"John Kinsella's "distractions" on Dante's Divine Comedy take the reader on highly visual journeys through Purgatorio: Up Close, Paradiso: Rupture, and Inferno: Leisure Centre before the cycle twists back to its beginning. Set in a small area of a large place, a patch of the wheatbelt in Western Australia, the reader accompanies the poet and his guide through a phantasmagoria of the real and imagined, of nature in its full regalia, resisting forces of damage and indifference that would see it destroyed. This is a book of hope and redemption that faces up to the terror and trauma in all of us, the terror and trauma we play out on the world, often unwittingly. This is a radical and lyrical book, deeply concerned with the macro and the micro, the regional and the international. Kinsella has created a world in which heaven, hell, and purgatory coexist, even require each other."--BOOK JACKET.