John Kinsella’s short stories paint a lyrical landscape

The stories in John Kinsella’s Crow’s Breath are remarkable for their ability to condense whole worlds into a few short pages.

Supplied Editorial Crow's Breath, by John Kinsella

The stories that make up John Kinsella’s Crow’s Breath are remarkable for their brevity or, more specifically, for their ability to condense whole worlds — the social lives of small towns, complex family relationships, histories and hauntings — into a few short pages. Few of the stories are more than five pages long, yet they are dense enough, and allusive enough, to resonate much further and conjure narratives that extend beyond the limits of the text.

This is, perhaps, to be expected from a writer such as Kinsella, who is most prominent as a poet. There is certainly something poetic in the economy and intensity of the language in these stories. Many of them, furthermore, are structured around a central metaphor or pun: a play on the two meanings of the word ‘‘refuse’’ under­scores The Tip, for example, and Monitor is about both lizards and the act of watching.

At times, however, this can feel a little heavy-handed — such as in the opening story, The Eagle. Here, a mother directly refers to her son as ‘‘my little lamb’’ three times in quick succession; it is this pet name that has caused the boy to fear being taken — as a newborn lamb might be — by a wedge-tailed eagle. But the multiple repetition feels forced and so undermines the otherwise delicate and nuanced portrayal of the young boy. Similarly, a later story follows a recovering drug addict learning to plough on a friend’s family farm, who refers to having dropped out of university, leaving an unfinished thesis on ‘‘Satan and Redemption in Paradise Lost’’ and this detail is jarring because it so obviously echoes his own trajectory within the tale.

But despite this occasional clunkiness in some of the structuring devices, the stories in Crow’s Breath are lyrical, and especially powerful in their evocations of landscapes and of the lives lived within them. These landscapes are diverse — and include small-town America, coastal villages in Ireland and the island Reunion, near Madagascar — but more often the stories are centred on Perth, Carnarvon and the West Australian wheat belt that is the setting for so much of Kinsella’s other work.

Landscape is, unsurprisingly, most important in these wheat-belt stories. Many are short portraits of life on the land and follow characters whose experiences and personalities are all shaped by the country they live on. There are farmers fighting to make a living on land ruined by rising salinity; a pair of country doctors struggling to service the ‘‘hundreds and hundreds of square kilometres’’ under their remit; and a water carrier who takes advantage of these very distances to conduct an illicit affair.

At times, too, these traces of the landscape are marked on or in the very bodies of these characters, such as the reclusive Mary in Monitor, who has had so many skin cancers burned from her pale skin that she no longer ventures outside without covering herself entirely, or the elderly engineer in The Sleeper, who has suffered chronic insomnia since traversing the wheat belt on a train as a child. Landscape here is not so much a character in the stories as the elemental force that propels them.

As a necessary consequence, perhaps, these wheat-belt stories are also inherently political. They chart the decline of country towns, the increasing degradation of farming land and the tenuous relationships between humans and animals — domestic, working and wild. At times, Kinsella explores these issues with an almost brutal matter-of-factness, such as in A Particular Friendship, where a farmer kills a pair of working dogs after they ‘‘go wrong’’.

The language is direct and spare, echoing the taciturnity and toughness of the farmer himself: ‘‘So he poisoned them. Strychnine. He killed the kelpies … He fed them baited meat and watched them die.’’

Elsewhere, these issues lie just beneath memories of childhood experiences or ghostly presences, each of which acts as a reminder of what has changed and what has been lost.

The main problem with Crow’s Breath, however, is that there is little variation in register and style across the collection.

Even as the stories move to different landscapes in the second half, and even though the voices and characters shift and change, the stories largely operate within the same two modes — either a melancholy, almost elegiac lyricism or a humorous, gentle satire.

Kinsella does use both of these modes with great skill and precision, but the collection begins to feel a bit monotonous as it progresses. Nonetheless, there is a real sensitivity, as well as great insight and affection at the heart of these stories, which are never undermined but rather bolstered by the important political messages they carry.

Fiona Wright is a poet and critic.

Crow’s Breath

By John Kinsella

Transit Lounge, 208pp, $25.95