A quarter of a century has passed since Ivor Indyk contributed a scathing review of John Kinsella’s first collected poems to the pages of ABR (July 1997), and the contending responses to that opinion have typified the reception of his poetry among the vituperative local poetry community ever since. This extravagant representation of his work – two volumes of close to a thousand pages each, with a third volume pending – might seem almost deliberately designed to expose the author to similar criticism. Rather than a conventionally shaped collected edition, this is more like a throwing open of filing cabinets, and the nearly 1,700 pages presented so far are certainly not all masterpieces.

Yet the invitation of this sweeping collection provides the opportunity to consider the development of Kinsella’s writing from its raw earliest examples to the skilled technique evident in his current writing. Of course, there is too much of it: at times one is reminded of the Art Brut tendency to populate every space, or of Antonin Artaud at Rodez blackening page after page in a trance of graphomania. But whereas Artaud’s output was largely consumed by rats, Kinsella’s overproduction has been meticulously preserved, with scarcely a typo, in this university press edition. And it isn’t as if the author is unaware of how he might be received: one minor cut-up poem is titled (in quote-marks), ‘Careerism gone mad verging on hubris.’ Who said that, I wonder?

Each volume is furnished with an explanatory introduction, though these tend to be more anecdotal than analytic, as if resisting the task of summative criticism the work appears to solicit. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth draws attention to Kinsella’s depiction of the Western Australian wheatbelt landscape in the earlier work, while Ann Vickery concentrates on the foregrounding of domestic portraiture in the mature poems of Kinsella’s more settled middle period. But there is more going on at the level of both form and thematics than these brief sketches convey.

Although he began publishing at a relatively early age, Kinsella took some time to sift through his influences, and the first two hundred pages (the work criticised by Indyk) are the most dispensable here, though they provide useful guidance for later developments. The handful of poems published in the 1980s under the name of John Heywood are written mostly in the Deep Image style he may have encountered through his undergraduate studies with David Brooks at the University of Western Australia. Generally, this work draws on US poets gathered in Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry (1962), rather than the more ‘open’ and radical strand anthologised by Donald M. Allen: James Dickey is a frequent reference point.