Tide

by John Kinsella

These gritty and lyrical stories sting with life and sing with truth. Robert Drewe The coast and dreams of being by the water are never far away in Kinsella s surprising stories of Australian small town life. They summon in us both longing and fear at the recollection of our own childhoods, families, friends and upbringings. Flight is a possibility. A boy builds a rocket from 44-gallon drums and packing cases, a lone farmer travels to London to glimpse the snow his late mother once spoke of, inseparable mates relocate to the inner city. But the elemental mystery of place, of the country, of the sea, invariably draws them back. Praise for John Kinsella Kinsella can see into the heart of the country, and the evidence of these taut, complex stories is that what he sees there is both ferocious and unresolved. Philip Mead, The Australian There is something of Lawson s fear and desolation ... highly satisfying and affecting. Tony Hughes-d Aeth, Southerly

Genres: Short Stories

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

John Kinsella is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. The recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award, he has taught at Cambridge University and Kenyon College. He lives in Western Australia.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive collection of stories. They're short short stories (32 stories in a book of 237 pages), which gives it something of the feel of a poetry collection, and that feels right for Kinsella. If you're familiar with his poetry then the stories fit into that mould. They're all set in Western Australia, mostly along the coast. The collection begins with a kind of gradual progression of stories with child protagonists through to adults, but it soon gets mixed up after that. For stories with such a similarity of setting there's a lot of variety, with some stories veering into more surrealistic effects although the majority of them could be described as 'realism'.

[Kit Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

You won't regret spending your money on this work - a series of short stories unified by the landscape in which they are set. Kinsella uses the small details of lives to tell his stories set in Western Australia.

A number of the stories didn't appeal to me. The title story, 'Tide', is heartbreaking. My favourite story was about the bachelor who flew to London to see the world that his English born mother came from.

You can tell Kinsella is a poet because of his economic use of language that powerfully evokes the setting and characters.

[Mark Friend · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I worked my way into this collection of short stories, I realised the unifying motif of the ‘Tide’ didn’t always infer the ocean or water but also in the turning points / the shifting tides of the characters and narrative structures. My engagement with the stories ebbed occasionally but I grew into Kinsella’s style and poetic sensibility that framed and shaped these pieces - sometimes beautiful and others brutal, there was always an element of the unexpected - that seemed obvious in hindsight- I’ll look forward to revisiting these stories in time.

[Moira Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were more interesting than others.