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John Kinsella is a prolific Australian poet, with already,
at forty-two, seventeen books of poetry to his credit. This ambitious new
work (we are told it has been twenty-five years in the making) is meant to be
read as an 'organic unit'. That said, it is not an easy read. Parts of it
are, like a forest of densely-packed tree-ferns full of rattling birds, hard
to negotiate. It is one of those books that has you wondering whether further
readings - provided one had stomach for them - would make you more at ease
with the conciseness of the description offered in the blurb's suggestions of
a clear construction. For one thing we are informed that Kinsella's book is
'radical and antipastoralÉa response to a classic of romance - Philip
Sidney's The 'Old' Arcadia'. This begs
the question: would reading Sidney's great work be of assistance, in the same
way that knowledge of Homer's Odyssey allows for meaningful parallels and contrasts in Joyce's Ulysses to go to work? Or is this an unfair demand? Is it
one of those books one puts down having gained a general impression of good
things going on but the relief that comes from a decision not to read it
again - as in my case it would be with Moby Dick or Vanity Fair? In any event, are readers satisfied
with the sort of 'intense impression' Eliot once said we should expect of
'difficult' poems like The Waste Land? And then again, as
Kinsella surely knows, there are two versions of Sidney's Arcadia: the 'Old' referred to, which he wrote in 1580 at Wilton, the estate of his
sister, Mary Countess of Pembroke, with the stated aim of simply amusing her,
describing it as 'an idle workÉa trifle, and that triflingly handled', and
the 'New' version published in
1593. Four years after writing the 'Old' and having done some serious thinking about what literature was and
what it was for, and having, as a result, written his thoughtful and charming
Apology for Poetry, Sidney set
about revising it with the intention of converting it into 'an absolute
heroical poem', full of 'notable images'. His friend Fulke Greville said of
Sidney's aim in writing The Arcadia, that 'In all the creatures of his making, his intent and scope was,
to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life' -
clearly also one of Kinsella's aims here. Sidney's general aim was the neo-classical one of
combining delight with teaching: in other words, it was highly moral. This
version, despite Sidney's alleged 1580 deathbed insistence on its being
destroyed, was published some thirteen years later. He had, by the time of
his death, only revised half of the Old Arcadia. The concluding two-and-a-half 'acts' were added,
after careful editing, by his sister. This version, like Kinsella's, is known
as the New Arcadia. One might not unfairly suggest therefore that
Kinsella's isn't new after all. Both of Sidney's Arcadias, as in Kinsella, are divided into five 'acts' and
may be more likened to the dividing up of a classical play. Sidney, it is
conjectured, may well have intended to convert the five 'acts' of the Old
Arcadia into a twelve-book epic, like
Spenser's The Faerie Queene
Kinsella's book is advertised as an 'epic'Éthough both writer and readers
have been spared the need to confront the daunting challenge of a twelve-book
work!
Perhaps we are merely to understand Sidney's Arcadia vaguely as a prime example of pastoral idyll, an
aristocratic daydream, the 'trifle' Sidney self-deprecatingly termed the Old
Arcadia. But this represents a failure to
recognise the its intrinsic value as an instance of Renaissance projections
of the Good Life - like Gonzalo's famous speech in The Tempest or Montaigne's essay on which it is based or Ben
Jonson's fine poem To Penshurst.
It is not simply a matter of idealised landscapes where the sun shines
forever and aristocrats, disguised as nymphs and shepherds, play at being
innocent, forever young and in love. Sidney's work in fact deals with
intrigue, deception, sexual politics, treason - in other words it sharpens
our awareness in the matter of good and evil; it subverts the pastoral as
well as delighting in it.
To state the obvious, Sidney's book is a prose romance interspersed with
songs and poems; Kinsella's is all poetry. However, structurally, like the Old
Arcadia, its five 'acts' each contain 'an
eclogue or eclogues' - what in pastoral writing is usually termed
singing-matches; they also each contain opening poems in which the persona
each time takes the same ruminative journey by car. In among these are poems
about various aspects of Australian landscape, its weathers, flora, fauna
(particularly birds): it is the placing of these that may make one loose
sight of the overall structure. That said, there is no doubting the
Eliotesque intense impression. But in a work this size, written in a variety
of styles and measures, it is not always easy to keep one's bearings or
sustain the required concentration. There are times when particular stretches
of writing are strikingly accessible - the so-called eclogues being good
instances. But a lot of the writing feels like a rarified stream of
consciousness, images and phrases that fail to achieve a verb cascading down
the page, many of them startling and original, a fair number of them,
however, puzzling and ending up simply coagulating. Too much richness isn't
good for the digestion or the palette and the incidences of virtuoso
performance can have you switching off whether you wish it or not. There are
times when you feel Kinsella, as my granny used to say, has swollied the
dictionary. The blurb is perhaps rather sanguine in its statement that
Kinsella has provided us with 'an organic unit whose components accumulate
and complement one another' to create 'a multi-angled view of the specific'.
For one reader at least there is often too much to take in, to keep going
back over, and not always make obvious sense of.
Part of the problem may lie in the unfamiliarity of Kinsella's territory and
lexis (a small example: it takes a little while before you realise that a
'twenty-eight' is a bird); and no doubt Australian readers will get more from
the work. My own short time spent down-under did help me 'see' some of the
landscapes, flora and fauna referred to but certainly not all the book would
require me to see.
So we are left with the intense impression. And, yes, it is intense. The
anti-pastoralism is patent: the stubborn arrogance and brutality with which
human beings destroy the landscape and its wildlife, and dispossess its
indigenous peoples is clear enough. And, yes, on offer is a corrective to the
idealisms of pastoral, the old aristocratic daydream of innocence and
dalliance; it is not the Tennysonian 'known landscapeÉan old friend that
continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things': rural
existence here is shown as red in tooth and claw; and on the evidence of this
book getting worse.
An aspect of the intense impression I was left with was the undeniable
passion and energy of the work. It is dazzling in two senses - as (1) bravura
performance and (2) the unfortunate overwhelming of one's vision, the
Conradian desire to make the reader 'see'. But find out for yourself; see if
you agree with the blurb's judgement that 'Viewing his native Western
Australia with different lenses zooming in and out - macro and macro and
wide-angle - it's a snapshot and a time lapse, a "new" pastoral that
recognises the cultural inheritance as well as the cultural baggage of the
bucolic.'
© Matt Simpson 2005
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