‘Old Growth’, the powerful new collection of stories from author John Kinsella

Scott Eathorne Quikmark Media, www.quikmarkmedia.com.au
In the luminous book of new stories, Old Growth (Transit Lounge $29.95), John Kinsella drops us seamlessly into the worlds of men, women and children at pivotal moments in their lives. In the title story, a husband who has lost his wife plans to destroy the old-growth bush she loved and escape to the city, with alarming consequences. Elsewhere, racism at a small town supermarket is resisted through friendship; in an act of kindness a frightening stranger turns up in a family’s woodshed; a home-made telephone transmits a dark truth; a theatre director is seduced into the world of an obsessive rabbit trapper; and two sisters find their lives thrown out of kilter by a charismatic junkie. This is a book of city and country, of challenge and threat, of sobriety and loss of control, but also of hope and beauty.

John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry are The Vision of Error: A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press, 2013) and Sack (Freemantle Press and Picador, UK 2014). His collection, Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012), won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. Tide, a collection of stories, was published by Transit Lounge in 2013. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and Professor of Sustainability and Literature at Curtin University.