Ghost of Myself
by John Kinsella

From the internationally revered Australian poet John Kinsella comes this exceptional new collection that traces the ghosts of this country’s violent and destructive history through the marks left on the land, in language and in ourselves.

A$24.99

(Paperback)

Ships on 1/07/2025

Overview

Ghost of Myself explores who we are when we write, how we embody what has come before us and what we will leave behind. These poems consider the ghostliness of colonial legacy and the impact of pastoralism and conventional farming on the land, and are concerned with the ‘pith’ of language – the way the new might come out of the compressions and controls of formal syntax and vocabulary. Deeply imbued with observations of the ‘natural world’, these poems contemplate how we witness, record and leave marks. Each poem is a ghost of itself, too, and offers an opportunity for addressing the wrongs committed to country, environment and history.

Details

Evelyn Araluen

‘Ghost of Myself is another masterpiece from one of the country’s fiercest voices. The poems in this collection move seamlessly between scales of industrial warfare and intimate tenderness for the land and its living spirit. Kinsella offers us something few writers can: an unflinching and unfailingly beautiful interrogation of what it is to be human in these horrifying times.’

Toby Fitch

‘There is no poet in so-called Australia who packs as much ecology – its specificities, diversities and proliferations, its entanglements with human industry and colonisation – into their poetry. These haunted poems … constitute an ethics of collectivity, an ethics for being in and a part of the planet’s multiplicity, so that our, or one’s, presence might be as ghostly as possible.’

Cassandra Atherton

‘John Kinsella embarks on a profound poetic exploration of identity and legacy, navigating the complexities of non-Indigenous presence in a landscape marked by colonial history. This is Australian neo-gothic poetry at its finest.’

Philip Mead

‘These poems open up an astonishing new direction for John Kinsella’s work. They continue his preternatural, expansive observations of the exterior and natural world, but are shaped by his sense of afterlives, including his own.’

John Kinsella

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His many awards include the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (three times). His latest books are the three volumes of his collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2024), and the story collection Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia. He lives on Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. In 2007 he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and in 2024 he was inducted into the Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame.