Aporia

Have a talk with a ghost or a duck or contest the destroyers of the land, listen to the roos and slow worms, marvel and question and rage and love the language with John Kinsella’s Aporia.

Aporia is a collection searching for logic where logic is hard to find or maybe can't be found. From the death of the poet's father, to considering the complex, troubled, and often distressing relationship between humans and non-human life, and through a sense of ghosts being materially present even when we doubt their existence, we undertake a journey in which reality and creative conception are in tension. This tension is embodied in the figure of the poet Hölderlin, and also through moments in Ovid's Metamorphosis, ongoing obsessions for Kinsella which he constantly circles back to, reconsiders, and departs from. Whether conversing with ghosts or the living, with animals or plants, these are poems concerned with transformative relationships with and within the “natural world.” Kangaroos, echidnas, ducks, owls, deer, slow worms, and many other creatures from around the world inhabit these pages, finding their own way through to autonomy and self-declaration as the poet argues with himself over the dynamics of life and death.