of threat and of brooding introspection. There is also, perhaps, a faint suggestion of meditative quest in “Nightwalker,” which occurs in other important Kinsella poems from the 1960’s (such as “Baggot Street Deserta” fromAnother September, and “A Country Walk” and “Downstream” from Downstream). Such an undertaking, however, is hardly conceived in hope and does not seem to be a quest for which the persona freely and gladly volunteers. Rather, it seems a condition into which he has been haplessly born.

It is not difficult to understand Kinsella’s confession that his vision of human existence is that of “an ordeal.” In fact, given the prevalence in his verse of ignorance, darkness, death, and the unnervingly unpredictable tidal movements of the unconscious—all frequently presented by means of apocalyptic imagery—there is a strong indication that the poet is doing little more than indulging his idea of “ordeal,” despite the prosodic virtuosity and furious verbal tension that make the indulgence seem an authentic act of soul baring. Such an evaluation, however, would be incomplete. Also evident is the poet’s desire to believe in what he has called “the eliciting of order from experience.” Kinsella’s verse is a continuing experiment in the viability of the desire to retain such a belief and a commitment to negotiate the leap of artistic faith that alone is capable of overcoming the abyss of unjustifiable unknowing that is the mortal lot. The possibility of achieving that act of composed and graceful suspension is what keeps Kinsella’s poetry alive and within the realm of the human enterprise.

Although Kinsella’s oeuvre exemplifies, to a dauntingly impressive degree, persistence and commitment in the face of the virtually unspeakable abyss, it has gone through a number of adjustments and modifications. Taken as a whole, therefore, Kinsella’s output may be considered an enlarged version of some of its most outstanding moments, a sophisticated system of themes and variations. In the words of the preface to Wormwood, “It is certain that maturity and peace are to be sought through ordeal after ordeal, and it seems that the search continues until we fail.”

One of the most important adjustments to have occurred in the development of Kinsella’s poetic career is his emergence from largely private, personal experience, primarily of love. His early poems, particularly those collected in Another September and Downstream, seem too often to conceive of experience as the struggle of the will against the force of immutable abstractions. While these poems respect the necessarily tense and tentative character of experience, they seem also to regard mere experience as a pretext for thought. These poems share with Kinsella’s later work the desire to achieve distinctiveness through allegories of possibility. However, their generally tight, conventional forms have the effect of limiting their range of possibilities. In addition, the typical persona of these poems seems himself an abstraction, a man with only a nominal context and without a culture.

Downstream

By Downstream, such isolation was being questioned. The concluding line of this collection’s title poem—“Searching the darkness for a landing place”—may be taken (although somewhat glibly) as a statement emblematic of much of Kinsella’s early work. However, the collection also contains poems that, while painfully acknowledging the darkness, consider it as an archaeological redoubt. One of the effects of this adjustment is that the poet’s personal past begins to offer redemptive possibilities. In addition, and with more obvious if not necessarily more far-reaching effects, a generalized past, in the form of Irish history, becomes an area of exploration. It is not the case that Kinsella never examined the past prior to Downstream (“King John’s Castle” in Another September is proof to the contrary). Now, however, to the powerful sense of the past’s otherness that “King John’s Castle” conveys is added a sense of personal identification.

The poem in Downstream that demonstrates this development in Kinsella’s range is “A Country Walk.” Here, the persona, typically tense and restless, finds himself alone, explicitly undomesticated, with nothing between him and the legacy of the past discernible in the landscape through which he walks. The poem does not merely testify to the influential gap between present and past (a crucial preoccupation in all modern Irish writing) but also enters into the past with a brisk openness and nonjudgmental tolerance. “A Country Walk” reads like a journey of discovery, all the more so since what is discovered is not subjected to facile glorification. The fact that the past is so securely embedded in the landscape of the poem suggests that history is in the nature of things and that there is as much point in attempting to deny its enduring presence as there is in trying to divert the river which is, throughout the course of the poem, never out of the poet’s sight. The poem ends, appropriately, on a note of continuity: “The inert stirred. Heart and tongue were loosed:/ ’The waters hurtle through the flooded night. . . .’”

If anything, the present is circumvented in “A Country Walk.” To ensure that the reader is aware of this, Kinsella daringly uses echoes of William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916” to show how antiheroic is contemporary Ireland and to emphasize that the country is still, to paraphrase a line from Yeats’s “September 1913,” fumbling in the greasy till. This moment in “A Country Walk” prefaces the understandable admission “I turned away.” The interlude, however, draws attention to a noteworthy feature of Kinsella’s verse: its satire. From the outset, Kinsella’s work was capable of excoriation. The addition of local, often contemporary, Irish subject matter has created the opportunity for some scalding satirical excursions.

Nightwalker, and Other Poems

Perhaps the most notorious of these sallies is to be found in the long title poem of Nightwalker, and Other Poems, a poem that, in many ways, is an illuminating counterpart to “A Country Walk.” Here, the setting is urban, contemporary Dublin, and the speaker, lacking the briskness of his opposite number in “A Country Walk,” refers to himself as “a vagabond/ Tethered.” The demoralizing spectacle of modern life is the poem’s subject. Nothing is spared. In particular, Kinsella’s years in the civil service are the basis for a damning portrait of national ideals stultified and betrayed. This portrait goes so far as to include figures from Irish public and political life who, although distorted by the poet’s satirical fury, remain eminently recognizable and still occupy the highest positions in the land. Each of the poem’s numerous scenarios is exposed as a hollow social charade, and in direct contrast to the sense of release felt at the end of “A Country Walk,” this poem concludes on a note of anticlimax: The speaker fails to find anything of redemptive value in current conditions.

Notes from the Land of the Dead, and Other Poems

Although Kinsella has by no means forsaken the satirical mode (as Butcher’s Dozen, Peppercanister’s first publication, makes vividly clear), his career has developed more fruitfully through exploring the pretexts and presuppositions of his need that poetry be a salvage operation, acknowledging existence’s many disasters and the intimacy of their wreckage and through acknowledgment saving face. Thus, in Notes from the Land of the Dead, and Other Poems and also in the later New Poems, the past is personal and the poems seem like diagnoses of memory and origins. Just as the setting for many of these poems is the poet’s childhood home, so the poems reveal what has to be internalized for the sake of comprehending one’s native land. In these poems, the speaker is the absorbed witness of others’ agony, not only the agony of the deathbed but also the equally unrelenting travail described in “Tear”: “sad dullness and tedious pain/ and lives bitter with hard bondage.”

The poems in Notes from the Land of the Dead, and Other Poems are also noteworthy for their degree of interaction with one another. Earlier, in Wormwood, Kinsella produced a strict yet supple poetic sequence. Now, the idea of sequence reemerges and takes more fluid form, a technique that can be seen embryonically in the interrelated sections of “Nightwalker” and that finds mature embodiment in many of the Peppercanister poems. This greater access to range and flexibility has enabled the poet to be less dependent on the singular effects of the dramatic lyric, where, as noted, there seemed to be a considerable degree of pressure to will experience to denote purpose. As a result of an increasing commitment to formal and metrical variety, Kinsella’s voice has become more authentically meditative, its brooding habit engendering a measure of containment rather than disenchantment. This voice is present not only in such important Peppercanister collections as One, A Technical Supplement, and Song of the Night, and Other Poems but also in some of the superb individual poems these books contain, notably Finistere (One) and “Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore” (Song of the Night, and Other Poems).

Butcher’s Dozen

It is not clear, however, that Kinsella established Peppercanister with the expectation that such wonderful poems would result. On the contrary, the press came into being because of the need to publish an uncharacteristic Kinsella production, a poem written for a particular occasion. The poem in question, Butcher’s Dozen, was written in response to the killing in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland, of thirteen civil rights demonstrators by British troops. This event took place on the afternoon of Sunday, January 30, 1972, a day that will live in infamy in the minds of Irish people. The poem’s immediate occasion is the horrifying event, but its subtitle, “A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery,” clarifies the line of attack taken by Kinsella. The subtitle names the Lord Chief Justice of the United Kingdom, Lord Widgery, chairman of the essentially whitewashing court of inquiry set up to examine the event. Thus, Butcher’s Dozen is a critique not only of the troops’ action but also of the mind-set such actions denote. The poem’s incisive and abrasive couplets enact an alternative language and disposition to that of the Lord Chief Justice’s report. While, from an aesthetic standpoint, Butcher’s Dozen is hardly Kinsella’s greatest poem, its significance as a cultural document is indisputable and is reinforced by the explanatory background notes that Kinsella wrote to accompany it.

A Selected Life and Vertical Man

The > other occasional poems contained in the Peppercanister series also have to do with significant deaths. In order of appearance, the poems are A Selected Life, Vertical Man, The Good Fight: A Poem for the Tenth Anniversary of the Death of John F. Kennedy, and The Messenger. It has become standard practice to regard A Selected Life and Vertical Man together, two independent but intimately related treatments of the one event, the untimely death of the poet’s friend, Seán Ó Riada. Again, the issue of cultural significance arises. Ó Riada, as well as being an accomplished composer of classical music (Vertical Man is the title of one of his compositions for orchestra), was also an extraordinary influence on Irish folk musicians. His conception of the rich tradition and important heritage of Irish folk music was the direct inspiration of the internationally acclaimed group the Chieftains. More relevant to the development of Kinsella’s career, Ó Riada’s scholarly, pleasure-giving rehabilitation of a dormant legacy is an important counterpart to the poet’s explorations in Irish-language poetry. As the penultimate stanza of Vertical Man has it: “From palatal darkness a voice/ rose flickering, and checked/ in glottal silence. The song/ articulated and pierced.”

The Good Fight

In the light of the public demeanor assumed in Butcher’s Dozen and the greater degree of interplay between textural openness and formal control contained in both Ó Riada poems, Kinsella undertook his most ambitious public poem, The Good Fight. Not only is the poem’s subject matter ambitious, in particular given how rare it is for Irish poets to seek subjects outside the ambit of their own culture and tradition (a rarity that later Irish poets such as Derek Mahon would work to dismantle), but also, formally speaking, The Good Fight is one of Kinsella’s more daring experiments.

As in the case of earlier Peppercanister poems on public themes, The Good Fight has an author’s note attached, which begins with the remark, “With the death of Kennedy many things died, foolish expectations and assumptions, as it now seems.” In a sense, the poem is a collage of contemporary desires, a view borne out by the numerous allusions to and quotations from Kennedy speeches and other sources from the period. However, such a view is contradicted by two other features of the poem. The most obvious of these are the various quotations from Plato’s Politeia (fourth century b.c.e.; Republic, 1701) and Nomoi (fourth century b.c.e.; Laws, 1804), which are used to counterpoint the poem’s development. This classical reference has the effect of measuring Kennedy’s fate against some nominal yet conventionally uncontroversial standard of age-old wisdom. This feature in turn is seen in terms of the pervasive sense of unfulfilled aftermath that pervades the poem. It seems remarkable that this achievement is so little known.

The Messenger

The significant death in The Messenger is not that of a well-known figure but of the poet’s father. This immensely moving document testifies to Kinsella’s growth as an artist. The poem’s subject, death, has been a constant presence in his work since “A Lady of Quality,” in Poems, and has been treated variously in such accomplished and representative poems as “Dick King” and “Cover Her Face” (both from Downstream). The Messenger, however, dwells more on celebrating the life that preceded its occasion than on the death of a man desiring to possess his culture: “The eggseed Goodness/ that is also called/ Decency.” The poet’s redemptive power and his cultural as well as personal responsibility to discharge it are seen to consummate effect in this powerful, moving work.

Blood and Family

Blood and Family, Kinsella’s first publication from a major publisher since the 1979 Peppercanister Poems, 1972-1978, is a reprint of later Peppercanister publications. The volume contains The Messenger, Songs of the Psyche, Her Vertical Smile, Out of Ireland, and St. Catherine’s Clock. The decision to open the volume with a reprint of The Messenger is a good one, given that it sets the cultural tone and prosodic idiom for the remainder of the poems. At the same time, it may be said that this volume consolidates rather than enlarges Kinsella’s reputation, not merely because of the familiarity of some of its contents but also because of the tension that its title invokes. The sense of belonging to two disjunctive collectives, family and nation, is here articulated thematically but also in terms of form and metrics. The result is an emphatic, diverse restatement of themes of brokenness and incompleteness that have informed the poet’s vision from virtually its inception. Although these themes are addressed and expressed with Kinsella’s typical vehement, tight-lipped energy, the impression remains one of ground being reworked as worked anew, of a poet revisiting old preoccupations in search of unfamiliar nuances.

Poems from Centre City

In Poems from Centre City, however, there is evidence of a slightly different Kinsella. The poems in this Peppercanister pamphlet address the state of contemporary Dublin in a much more direct way than hitherto, lacking the range and ambition of, for example, “Nightwalker,” and presenting themselves more intimately, as more the products of occasions, than is customary with this poet. Metrically simple and verbally direct, they attempt to come to terms with the decay—physical, moral, and institutional—of Kinsella’s native place. Decay as a subject is no stranger to Kinsella’s imagination. However, despite the comparatively fresh perspective on the poet’s concerns that Poems from Centre City provides, it should not be assumed that the collection is intended to be thought of as a polemic. The inclusion of a poem on W. H. Auden, one of Kinsella’s most permanent influences, may be understood as a caution against the reader’s comprehending Poems from Centre City as a narrowly activist set of statements on, for example, an environmental theme.

At the same time, the diagnostic—or at least exploratory—thrust of much of Kinsella’s work is once again in evidence in this small sampling of his work. The formal range is restricted; the subject matter is largely drawn from the immediacy and adventitiousness of an attentive citizen’s experience. A number of the poems are suggested by memory, though all succeed in avoiding either moralizing or sentimentality. In terms of accessibility and immediate effectiveness, Poems from Centre City is among the most appealing of Kinsella’s later works.

The Pen Shop

The 1990’s found Kinsella publishing a number of poetry collections, often slight in size but heavy in themes and recollections. The Pen Shop, a small volume consisting of two sections titled “To the Coffee Shop” and “To the Pen Shop,” focuses on the renewal of a poetic career late in the poet’s life. Readers find Kinsella strolling through the streets of Dublin, visiting favorite haunts—the General Post Office, Grafton Street, the Guinness brewery, Trinity College—and seeing the specter of his father in every turn. He meanders to Nassau Street for “some of their best black refills” from the pen shop, and then finds himself at Bewley’s, the city’s famed tea and coffee shop. Rather than partake in tea or coffee, he instead consumes pills from a tin, needing the black draft of medicinal inspiration to enter his system “direct” with its taste of death, “foreign and clay sharp”; for only in this way may he be jolted into imaginative life and become the grand instrument of his muse’s spectral writing: “The long body sliding in/ under my feet.” Only then may he no longer be, like the other old men in Bewley’s, “Speechless.” Indeed, only then may he, like the first voices, “rising out of Europe,” become “clear in calibre and professional,/ self chosen,/ rising beyond Jerusalem.”

The Familiar

In 1999, Kinsella issued two short books simultaneously. The Familiar consists of the longer title poem and three short poems, all erotically charged and intimate, a style familiar to Kinsella readers. However, here the familiarity is of the flesh, with some mythical overtones. In the title poem, there are “demons over the door” and he has a “Muse on [his] mattress.” When he goes to relieve himself during a night of lovemaking, he sees “three graces above the tank.” The love scene ends with Kinsella invoking, in the volume’s three short poems, a saint in “St. John’s,” a bride in “Wedding Night,” and “Iris,” the messenger of the gods.

Godhead

Godhead consists of two short poems and a longer title poem. It has little in common thematically with The Familiar, since the two short poems are American seascapes (“High Tide: Amagansett” and “San Clemente, California: A Gloss”) and the title poem is an evocation of the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. However, both collections share a continuity in their terse, grainy, and stark poetic styles. His poems display a characteristic Irish style in their mythical and religious approach, yet at the same time are startlingly concrete and even irreverent. To speak of the crucifixion as “The Head hanging on one side,/ signifying abandonment” is gruesomely effective, while to end with the line “Dust of our lastborn” seems anticlimactic but haunting.

Collected Poems, 1956-2001

Toward the end of any poet’s career comes the need to produce a complete works. Inevitably, earlier work will have gone out of print, and the poet may experience a need to revise and re-arrange early poetry in the light of later developments. In Kinsella’s case, there had been attempts to produce selected works in 1973 and 1979, but by 1990, much of his earlier work had gone through a period of comparative neglect, as other Irish poets, most obviously Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, came to the fore. This resulted in most of his earlier work being largely unavailable.

The production of Collected Poems, 1956-1994 in 1996 was a major rehabilitation for Kinsella and made his work known to the general public for the first time in many cases. What was significant about the collection was the enormous revision that the earlier poetry had gone through at Kinsella’s hand. This only emphasized what students of his writing always knew: that he regarded all his poetry as work in progress, as opposed to, say, Muldoon, who refused to revise his poetry, saying he had no more right to revise it than his readers did.

Kinsella had cut out many of the more Romantic, florid gestures from the earlier poetry, pointing toward the style he was now adopting of simpler, ungestured statement. He had also rearranged some of the poems, and a sense of unity about the oeuvre as a whole was beginning to emerge. Also incorporated were the more or less final version of many of the Peppercanister poems.

The 1996 edition was published by Oxford University Press, one of Kinsella’s main publishers. However, in 1999, Oxford University Press decided to cut poetry from its publishing list. This meant little for Kinsella’s new work, as the Peppercanister Press was handling that, but it left the Collected Poems, 1956-1994 high and dry. After some negotiation, Carcanet Press, based in Manchester, England, agreed to produce Collected Poems, 1956-2001. It was published in 2001 in the United Kingdom, but copyright did now allow for distribution in the United States. In 2006, Wake Forest University Press published an American version.

Perhaps for the first time, the Collected Poems, 1956-2001 clearly showed Kinsella’s development as being in many ways parallel to that of his great predecessor Yeats. An initial lyrical period, full of imagery, was followed by periods of more political commitment and ironic statement and by more symbolic, very complex personal statements of belief, often drawing on Jungian psychology. Finally came a reversion to a more settled, simpler style, where any form of poetic pretentiousness was avoided.

The other development that can be traced is Kinsella’s move to the United States, which resulted in a freeing from traditional bonds of expectation and expression; however, unlike with Muldoon, Kinsella’s themes, imagery, and subject matter remain rooted in his Irishness. The depths found by fellow Irish writer James Joyce are mediated through such American poets as William Carlos Williams and in particular Robert Lowell. Kinsella’s poetry thus becomes more and more Western mainstream and less and less stereotypically Irish, a move that did not meet the approval of all critics.