At the age of forty-five – ten years older than the protagonist of the Commedia – John Kinsella offers us his “distractions” on the three canticles of his predecessor’s great Christian epic. [1] However, Kinsella takes the reader from “Purgatorio: Up Close” to “Paradiso: Rupture,” and – only then – to “Inferno: Leisure Centre”. The author justifies his reordering of Dante’s Other World: “we have made our own purgatory and have to unmake it to survive. We simply have to move towards a Paradise – one can’t countenance Inferno, which is why I’ve started where I have” (pp. 5-6).

For Kinsella, “the world is a purgatory, with hell close at hand.” The only hope is “to move constantly towards the light” (p. 4). The entire drama is observed from a five-and-a-half acre patch of land in Western Australia, next to Walwalinj, a mountain with “some of the rarest bush in the world at its summit” that offers “miracles of survival in a land largely cleared for farming” (p. 3). After more than a decade spent mostly elsewhere, the poet decided to immerse himself in “writing about one small space consistently over the period of a year,” constantly struggling to evoke the genius loci. These few acres “are the terraces of Purgatory proper” (p. 4).

Kinsella’s text is a supreme example of interdiscursivity, based as it is on an easy familiarity with Dante’s portrayal of the world beyond the grave. However, unlike Dante – who had to be guided by Virgil to Eden, where he was reunited with his Beatrix, a young Florentine woman –, Kinsella is accompanied by his one guide throughout. “Beatrice is no virtual figure for me […] my partner Tracy (also a poet) lures me on upwards, though she is no divine” (p. 5). Indeed, Tracy “might or might not be in Paradise. Depends what she’s doing at any given time. She is a busy person. She doesn’t do God’s job for him/her/it […]” (p. 162). Consequently, Kinsella’s Paradiso “is a poem about the ineffable […] that God is in love, is in nature, is in ourselves […] It’s a poem about environment and family. It’s an extended love poem,” one which “uses as its prime template the small region outside York in Western Australia that concerns the Purgatorio, but travels elsewhere as well” (p. 163).

Readers coming to Kinsella via Dante immediately grasp the fact that the craftsman uses for his verse “the ‘traditional’ three-line stanzas, though I have not used terza rima […] the structure remains loyal, at least on the subtextual level” (p. 6). Dante’s revolutionary injection of the humble, lowly style into the polyphony of his Commedia (e.g., Par. XXV 122-23) finds its counterpart in:

              […]  I am driving
Tim home and he says Mum will be back from the East
in four sleeps, and you, Dad, can talk to me
like Mum talks to me when you’re gone.

– and, just as Dante introduced terms like fart and sewer into his epic(Inferno XXVIII 24; Paradiso XXVII 25), Kinsella moans: “Ghosts fuck with my head / like clichés” (p. 20). At other times, technical terms such as fractals, podzolic strike this reader as the modern equivalent of Dante’s celebrated neologisms. Fractals makes its appearance at the close of Canto of Gluttony (23), where “commencing psalmody” invokes the lamentation over the destruction of the Holy City as well as Christ’s (and Beatrice’s) words warning of his exit from and return to this world: Modicum, et non videbitis me; / et iterum … modicum, et vos videbitis me (cf. Purg. XXXIII 1-2, 10-12). The same Latin quotations return in Canto of the Borders, which refers to Tracy’s travelling “far for Anne Garréta, / doppelganger of the genderless whore” – the latter a good example of the demands the poet makes on his readers in references to Buñuel, Dalì, Rodin, Neruda and Bartolomé Bermejo.[2] But the poet also speaks directly to the reader’s heart (p. 140):

I have been distressed by the unfathomable
Death of a wattle tree, ground cracking
At the heart of an ant colony –

Purgatory is followed by Paradiso: Rupture (pp. 165-260) and, finally, Inferno: Leisure Centre (pp. 274-408). As Kinsella explains, “What makes this ruptured ‘space’ [Paradiso] so different from the distracted Purgatorio is that I keep celebration, affirmation, and even ‘perfection’ in mind” (p. 161). Recalling the title of Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost, the reader accepts the fact that it is necessary to “celebrate what has not been lost, and acknowledge what has. In a land stolen from others […] you acknowledge that theft and look to heal and recompense this loss. Paradise is colonisation, it is theft, it is subjugation […] But in our children I do find hope” (p. 162).

A vivid illustration of this is found in Canto of my Great Great Grandfather – Edward Pat Kinsella (pp. 184-86). Its parallel in Dante’s Comedy is the encounter with the poet’s trisavolo, Cacciaguida, who appears to him as a crusader who had been knighted at his death in the Holy Land (Paradiso XV-XVII). Kinsella’s ancestor:

[…] My great great grandfather
Edward Pat Kinsella, speaks
out as a settler – not a warrior,

but nonetheless, by his migration,
hope, opportunism, determination,
a ‘soldier’ of the occupation:

“O sanguis meus, o superinfusa
gratia Dei, sicut tibi, cui
bis unquam celi ianua reclusa?”

The last three lines are taken from Paradiso XV 28-30, the only tercet Dante composed in Latin for his sacred poem. The Cacciaguida episode is in turn reminiscent of Aeneas’s meeting with Anchises in Vergil’s Aeneid (VI 835).

Now:
Tracy is doing the research.
She says it’s vital for the children.
She also believes in native title.

Her smile at this paradox
is no calque – she inspires me:
we have both lost our early beliefs.

Cicadas drill clusters of stars,
They hold the sun at night,
equal proportions of heat

and light, and we are their bodies,
so long below ground, ecstatic
        on the surface.

The oblique reference to the French calque/calquer (‘to trace’, ‘copy’) lights up Tracy’s smile, while the verbal strategies and power of Kinsella’s language enchant the reader, dazzled by the pyrotechnics of the Canto of All Birds Celestial, and delighted by the “periscopic curiosities of red kangaroo” on the Doodenanning Golf Course (p. 10), as well as by the complex polyphony of the Canto of Divine Justice, which turns away from Dante’s celestial and imperial eagle (Paradiso XIX) in its opening ‘conversational’ line: “Haven’t seen eagles around here for months”. Instead, “the pink and grey galahs circulate”:

My father would say: Stop being a galah.
A boss on the wheatbins: You’re a bit of a galah.
A farmer in the Mingenew pub: you lot

are carryin’ on like a flock of galah.
The Macquarie Dictionary says, colloquially,
galah means ‘a fool’. I discern its beauty.

Like Dante, Kinsella is politically committed: especially to the rights of the ancient inhabitants of Australia, to its fauna and flora. Auden was surely wrong to claim that poetry makes nothing happen. But it needs a sympathetic audience, whose presence is not always felt: “[…] I listen with politically sensitive ears, / wondering why my ironies go to waste […]” (Canto of Listening to Birds in the Tree).
Inferno forms the last section, where “The world is being killed by small acts added together as much as by large acts” (267).

In Canto of the Examination of Hope (cf. Paradiso XXV), Tracy exhorts the poet:

Make the best of the here and now.
Your days are full of galahs

And crows, wasps and mice –
isn’t that enough? Things grow
on the block, and growth is radiance […]

You told me that as a child a square inch
of ground mattered more than all
your toys, that a single speck of light

in the night sky was as mind-blowing as the sun.
True, I reply, and nothing’s changed.
All the same, it was an endgame.

In reading Kinsella’s verse, we recall that poet has its origin in the Greek verb meaning ‘to create’. Everywhere in this Divine Comedy we are made to sense the joy of verbal creation, to experience the power of words to evoke and delight, as in this closing extract from the Canto of Different Angles:

Jam tree skeletal, bark shedding like sloughed
gwarder skin, wood holed by borers singing
below audibility: tin whistle, baroque recorders

imported like black pollen, white fungus
prized by small ants demolishing the local,
moving through wells of interpolated rocks.

Dante would have rejoiced.

[2] Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx, published in 1986, narrates the love between two beings whose sex is never specified. Bermejo’s painting of Saint Michael triumphant over the Devil (National Gallery, London) inspired both Kinsella and his great friend and mentor Peter Porter (who died on 24 April 2010).