The main focus of this issue of Imago is clearly John Kinsella. There are two pieces by him, "Crop Circles", a play, and a selection from his extensive, as yet unpublished novel Post-Colonial, as well as a lengthy interview by Heather Wellstead. Kinsella has published 18 collections of poetry, and his "Crop Circles" is an interesting variation on the modern style of playwriting, taking elements like poetic monologues and the role of the chorus from Greek classic tragedies like Aeschylus and Euripides, to create a play with a timeless feel. The character list is relatively small, and the plot is simple, involving the mystery of local crop circles which have appeared on the property of the town’s largest landowner, and the ongoing problem of rising salinity which is threatening to destroy the town. The setting involves stark contrasts between the sky, the land, and the salt, while the dialogue involves minimal interactions between the characters, whose are themselves caricatures, dressed to match their occupations, and speaking in lyric monologues suggestive of the strophe and antistrophe of Agamemnon. The Greenie serves as the primary chorus, predicting doom with sometimes banal, and sometimes moving poetry such as “When the evenings/brooded bruised and red”. The characters move in and out of poetry, sometimes speaking in dialogue, and sometimes answering each other in stanzas. As Kinsella’s stage instructions indicate: “The distinction between character and language should be blurred. They are what they speak. The poetry and dialogue should be treated as one.” The themes of greed, environmental disaster, and the way the earth deals with it are clear, and the overall feeling is that of epic, on a grand scale. The way in which the work slips in and out of poetry provides an interesting perspective both on poetry and drama, incorporating subtle imagery and metaphor with action and dialogue.
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