In this forceful call to action, acclaimed poet John Kinsella explores
deeply felt and ever more insistent ecological concerns in his signature
lyrical and experimental activist poetry. Here Kinsella turns his
restless, unblinking gaze to a world where art, music, and
philosophy--the highest creations of the human imagination and
empathy--suddenly find themselves in a time and place that not only deny
their importance, but can seem to have no use for them at all. In
answer, Insomnia offers poems of self-accusation and angry protest,
meditations on the nature of loss and trauma, and full-throated
celebrations of the natural world.
Kinsella attempts to find a still point from which we might reconfigure
our perspective and examine the paradoxes of our contemporary
experience. Ranging sleeplessly from Jam Tree Gully, Western Australia,
to the coast of West Cork, Ireland, and haunted by historical and
literary figures from Dante to Emily Brontë, Insomnia may be
Kinsella's most varied, concentrated, and powerful collection to date.