Since the publication of his first major collection of poetry, Night Parrots, in 1983, John Kinsella has become known as one of the most innovative and prolific Australian poets working today. "Since Night Parrots," wrote Australian Book Review contributor Thomas Shapcott, "John Kinsella has produced an astonishingly assured series of poetry volumes." Kinsella has published over twenty poetry collections in his career, which has stretched over the better part of two decades. His work has been recognized by regional and national awards. "To re-read Night Parrots . . . is to realise how early Kinsella found a language and a cadence that continue to act as a uniforming agent through the diverse linguistic and thematic territories he so willingly explores," said Shapcott.

Critics have recognized two separate strains in Kinsella's work: a pastoral, narrative strain, acknowledging the impact his Western Australian homeland has had on his life and his work, and an experimental strain that plays with language and with the structure of poetry itself. World Literature Today contributor Paul Kane declared in his review of The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony that Kinsella's "most accomplished mode as a poet" lies in his pastoral work. "In Kinsella's poetry these are lands marked by isolation and mundane violence and by a terrible transcendent beauty," Kane continued. "The poems are variously inflected to present the fullness of Kinsella's vision, and there is a pleasing variety of poetic forms deployed, from limpid narratives to complex formal structures." More experimental works, such as the material found in the collections Syzygy and Eschatologies, have met with less effusive praise. "Although convinced that there is plenty to be found in such poems," wrote Australian Book Review contributor Simon Patton about Eschatologies, "the extreme condensation of the language is often disturbing. Some would argue for 'tight construction' and the 'fragmentation of modern consciousness.' Others would agree that the opening line 'Best left unsaid' sums it up rather too perfectly." "The relentless experimentation of Full Fathom Five and Syzygy, " stated Patton in another Australian Book Review contribution, "makes for challenging poetry in which language is pushed beyond its comfortable shapes and where—possibly—something from the fringes slithers in."

"I'd like to emphasise that there is a third body of work in which these two disparate elements are active," Kinsella states in "A Brief Poetics," reprinted on his Web site. "It is this work that I would see as the 'true Kinsella.' The poems that have been chosen by the editors . . . in many ways belong to this third category. There are obvious meditative and narrative qualities in them, but there are also plays on language and form which I would consider in the context to be experimental." These two elements, critics noted, emerge in collections such as The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony. "You realise Kinsella is capable, in this pastoral departure, of real poise and evocativeness," explained Peter Rose in the Australian Book Review, "and that there are other dimensions to the poetry, levels of weirdness, irony, [and] regret." Sean O'Brien stated in his Times Literary Supplement review of The Undertow: New and Selected Poems, "Kinsella has an obvious integrity which will encourage the skeptical reader to accompany him not only in the pastoral but at any rate some of the way into the more histrionically challenging region of Syzygy."

Kinsella told Contemporary Authors, "I am a vegan anarchist pacifist of many years. I am a strong supporter of cultural respect and indigenous rights. I believe in spiritual freedom and gender liberation. I campaign for environmental awareness and animal welfare."

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