I admire the ease with which John Kinsella’s work here manages to be simultaneously up close and localised as well as cosmological in scale which makes its overall engagement with Romanticism so rich and complex. The fog poems especially stood out for me and also the stunning Wurmlinger Kapelle Cycle, and the Emily poems too. It’s a book that feels communal in spirit for all of these touchstones and it reflects Kinsella’s forensic knowledge of where he lives so respectfully which is another expression of this sense of communality. Equally admirable is the profound formal condensing—the engagement with both the aesthetic and political dimensions of work by earlier poets. I am certain that many readers are going to be struck by the beautiful and significant body of work that is Minimalist.
Lucy Dougan
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This is a field journal of sorts—a collection of moments and an engagement with mutability and loss. That might seem redundant, but change and loss are not co-determinate. Change can so readily be improvement, of course, but not when it comes to the destruction of habitat and the exploitation of life in any form. Not for me. Loss does haunt this book—of people, of habitat—but I also hope that there’s affirmation and respect in advocating for whatever cannot advocate for itself.
Writing poetry, for me, is an acknowledgement of purpose—the reification of a belief that commitment and action can bring positive change. Hopefully, through acts of remembering, we can respect and conserve, and through intervention we can interrupt negative mutability and prevent unnecessary loss.… So many of these poems are concerned about being in ‘place’ and the responsibilities this entails. So many of them come at a tangent to greater ecological concerns, to questions of ‘involvement’ in temporal-spatial relations.… Some things remain essential truths for me: colonialism is wrong; capitalism is corrosive; and exploiting people or the environment are wrong (and clear-cut losses). Herein, a minimalist approach to concerns around rapacity
John Kinsella
August 2025