Crow's Breath

Winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and Christopher Brennan Award (for lifetime achievement in poetry) and shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Prize for a collection of short fiction, John Kinsella returns with a not-to-be-missed addition to the canon of one of Australia’s most original and incisive writers.

A man who never sleeps takes a cross-continent train journey into landscape and memory. A gregarious woman and a reclusive man move to an Irish village where history and tradition (the famine pit nearby, the festival of Halloween) enact their dark forces. In an Australian town dying from the encroachment of salinity, a young girl attempts to bring life to a dead dog. Whether documenting love or horror, or finding quotidian absurdities in Australia or the world , the powerful stories in Crow’s Breath capture the precariousness of everything we most value with unsettling tenderness and beauty.

About the Author

Based on the western Australian landscape and loosely modeled on Philip Sidney's classic romantic pastoral "Arcadia."

One of Australia's best poets, drawn to the natural world, vividly depicts the western Australian wheat-belt landscape in this brilliant epic poem. Analogies are made between the pastoral idyll and the radical and antipastoral necessitated by today's rural world (salinity, pesticides, road kill, soil erosion, and dispossession of indigenous peoples).