This collection [Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems ] of Australian poet John Kinsella’s crisp and vivid works is a delight. Dedicate some time to sitting down with these poems and appreciating the subtle rhythms, the vibrant images, and the layers of meaning to be found in each. Kinsella’s poems do seem to be lit with a kind of peripheral light, conjuring as they do visions of gray skies and pastoral settings. His use of language is very precise, and yet it does not lack emotion, but rather conveys it in a refined and pure state, proving him to be an exceedingly gifted poet.

Birds soar in and out of Kinsella’s poetry with such frequency that one begins to sense they are watching from treetops even in poems where they are not explicitly mentioned. Finches, hawks, cranes, magpies, parrots, kites, and parakeets, they appear as specters and harbingers of death, and as reflections of our own selves and the ways in which we face life and death. In “Crane and Hawk,” Kinsella writes:

Turning and cutting the same path over,
the crane relies on what we know as patience,
while the hawk effortlessly shadows—
death’s mimic playing with time.

To read this verse is to be lying on a hillside and watching birds circle in the sky, and contemplating their direction, and the meaning of their paths.

As there must be for a writer who talks of the landscape of Australia, there are images of drought, of fire, and of the ways nature and humankind collide. He muses on America too, and the pastoral, almost historic scenes are punctuated with moments of modernity that keep the reader grounded in a realistic present.

There are also musings on the power or impotence of poetry, and the difficulties in capturing nature’s intangible elements. In “Links” Kinsella say, “The drifting sand does not / lend itself to description,” yet that line somehow achieves the description he says is so challenging. Later, in “The Gift,” the somehow weighty observation, “prayer suffers / no loss in translation.” Finally, in “Lighting the Bushman Fire Before the Others Rise,” he says, “Everything here is Biblical—you don’t / choose to write it.” Furthermore, the subtitle of one of the poems is “why I despair of poetry having any meaning beyond the page.”

Yet Kinsella’s work contradicts his worries. These are poems that linger in the mind, so well crafted and clean, yet with a subtle influence that winds its way into your thoughts and will leave you with much to think about. Spend time with these poems, and then return to them. The words may not change, yet with each reading more is uncovered from between the lines.