The Wound

The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. Kinsella describes himself as a 'vegan anarchist pacifist', and The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area's wildlife, the biodiversity of which is equal to that of the whole of England. In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity, as this collection includes two books of poems, the first inspired by the character of Mad King Sweeney from Irish epic Buile Shuibhne, and the second comprised of works 'interacting' with poems written by German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin.

The Wound takes the form of two short books in conversation with each other; the first from the perspective of Sweeney, anti-hero of the epic poem Buile Suibhne, the second an 'interaction' with poems by Hoelderlin. Both books form a response to the destruction of the environment witnessed by the poet. This is Kinsella at his most powerful.