Formerly CIP. Uk

Machine generated contents note: Burning Eyes -- Owl -- Holus-Bolus -- The Sleep of Blowflies -- Aberration -- Habitat -- Gullet -- Sitting in the Car, a Hair's-breadth Away -- Write-off -- The Inversion of Simonides' Line about the Sun -- Words of Power -- Yellow -- Dog-Shape Elegy -- Reverse Anthropomorphism -- Cutworms -- Distended Triolet -- Where the Almond Tree -- Easterlies -- Idyllatry -- Processional Caterpillars Mistaken for Spitfires -- Dip -- Hyperbole -- Dust Funnel Cloud -- Inland Cemetery: Extreme Heat -- Resurrection Plants at Nookaminnie Rock -- Quake -- Wreck -- Hay Cutting -- Work Rural Work -- Beetopic or Beetopia? -- The Decay of Hemispheres: a Defence of Mathematics -- Childhood Phenomenology of the Opposite Bank -- Sand Tale -- Zoo Visits -- Sea Shanties -- The Sway of a Coastal Pine Tree -- Wreck at Coogee Beach (1905--) -- What I Saw off Cheynes Beach -- The Dead -- Megamouth Shark -- Blue-ringed Octopi -- Waterwheel by the Oceans --

Contents note continued: The Merry-Go-Round by the Sea (Geraldton, Western Australia) -- The Vitiation of Presence -- Three Poems on Armour -- Knight's Armour at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge -- Metal Horse Sculpture in Northam Town Park -- Durer's Rhinoceros -- Two Poems for Peter Porter -- Vixerunt -- The Ambassadors -- Elegy For -- Lyrics or Caveats Written on Indian Pacific Train Travelling from Perth to Adelaide -- Wattle -- Each Jolt -- Gimlets -- `I Get a Kick Out of You'/'What a Wonderful World' -- Mallee -- On Schedule -- Caveat -- Neighbours -- Nullarbor Sunrise -- Dead Steer -- Utilitarian -- Crossing the Border (in Realtime) -- Cook -- Maralinga -- Wirangu Meeting Place/Barton Siding -- Ziggy's Humpy at Barton Siding -- Sunset Approaches, Behind Us (South Australia, Heading Towards Port Augusta) -- Baudelaire.

With Armour, the great Australian poet John Kinsella has written his most spiritual work to date and his most politically engaged. The world in which these poems unfold is strangely poised between the material and the immaterial, and everything which enters it kestrel and fox, moth and almond does so illuminated by its own vivid presence: the impression is less a poet honouring his subjects than uncannily inhabiting them. Elsewhere we find a poetry of lyric protest, as Kinsella scrutinizes the equivocal place of the human within this natural landscape, both as tenant and self-appointed steward. Armour is a beautifully various work, one of sharp ecological and social critique but also one of meticulous invocation and quiet astonishment, whose atmosphere will haunt the reader long after they close the book.

Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Poetry, 2012.