Deep River. "Rivers" by Peter Porter, Sean O'Brien and John Kinsella and "The State of the Rivers and Streams" by Warrick Wynne. [review]

Abstract

Rivers are important to us in all sorts of ways: usefully symbolic for poets, often loved in childhood while ‘messing about in boats’, sucked dry by cotton farmers, worried over by environmentalists, boosted by local patriots, and so on. The indefatigable Australian poet John Kinsella was certainly onto a good idea when he recruited two other poets based in England to join him in a three-way livre composé about the subject. Warrick Wynne’s third collection would, from its title, seem to have much in common with the Kinsella project; in the book’s first third, this is the case. Here, the poems are all landscape, geology and weather features, sometimes employed symbolically, as in ‘The River of History’, but more often used simply for their non-human selves.