Visitants

Loosely centered around the theme of space aliens invading our comfortable, empty environments--whether as cigar-shaped specks falling across the landscape or in the form of dialogic ""others"" with whom we commune in awkward, somewhat ""experimental"" tongues (""Visitant Eclogue"")--Kinsella's 19th book of poetry fully demonstrates that this ambitious, talented Australian poet shows no signs of letting up. The Kinsella oeuvre is becoming massive--two years ago a 350-page Poems 1980-1994 appeared, along with a volume of new work, The Hunt & Other Poems; Kinsella threatens to become the Whitman, Wordsworth and Spenser (with his emphasis on the ""new pastoral"") of his country in one fell swoop. Here, he takes full advantage of what has been dubbed the ""natural surrealism"" of the Australian landscape, writing of people who appear troubled by some itch, some voice they've heard in the backyard or something that appeared only upon reflection--or maybe in an old snapshot--that upon closer analysis could only have been sign of a ""visitant"": ""I'd swear it wasn't there before I lifted/ the camera--a Pentax Super--I looked/ directly at what's now the picture./ And I'm looking at it now--that 2001-like plinth/ rising out of the field, defying/ sky and fenceline and bales of leaden cloud."" These shadowy ""others"" are, it becomes clear, an alternate version of ourselves, or at least the creations of our minds in response to some lack, a need for meaning. Kinsella's lines are loose, sometimes veering into sloppiness, and his attempts at play on forms, such as the eclogue, sestina or sonnet, can seem like mere showing off. But when the Kinsella word-machine is at full throttle, he's able to amaze on whatever subject is at hand: alien, vegetable or mineral. (Apr.)