Limbo: The Fourth Canticle by John Kinsella T S Eliot Valerie Bloom

Valerie Bloom

the judges' citation notes

with compelling new work added to underline his work as witness

a pool in which language or thought-as-body glide through cultural and or phenomenological spaces

and helps us find answers to the eternal mysteries of being human

Limbo: The Fourth Canticle by John Kinsella T S Eliot Valerie BloomLimbo: The Fourth Canticle is John Kinsella's blazing coda to Dante, recasting the first canticle of The Divine Comedy inside the scorched, mined and surveilled landscapes of contemporary Western Australia. In these thirty four cantos, with their mirroring sub cantos and subscripts, Limbo is no quiet vestibule. It is a wheatbelt of burned jarrah and rock, a valley of blue tongue skinks, galahs and black cockatoos, threaded through with grain trains,