With work so dynamically “in progress,” it is inevitable that the latest complete volume, From Centre City (1994), collecting the previous five Peppercanister sequences—One Fond Embrace (1988), Personal Places and Poems from Centre City (both 1990), Madonna and Open Court (both 1991)—should reveal Kinsella setting forth on further journeys, with new departures leading to new beginnings. He has returned to Ireland, for example, to full-time writing, living first in Dublin and next Co. Wicklow. As the poet himself has noted. “The business has begun again.”¹ Indeed, the “business” will go on, by definition, without end: the quest for understanding in a world of process and perpetual dialectical tension can never be final nor can the possession of understanding be absolute. The “data” accumulate and never remain static, and thus structures require constant refining and rearranging. Likewise, Kinsella’s protagonist persistently investigates his self, his family and ancestral ghosts, and both his present and ancient primordial history, and such investigations in turn bear closely upon the discipline of the artist and his literary inheritance. The search for structure to encompass meaning, whether within the self, the world of time and space, or the creative act itself, is compelling and necessary, even if, in the last resort, it must remain incomplete. Moreover, that search, while leading to understanding, also involves suffering and loss and demands sober self-scrutiny and unflinching integrity. In “At the Head Table” Kinsella offers through the familiar figure of the craftsman one more defense of his poetic purpose and strategy:

                                        I have devoted
my life, my entire career,
to the avoidance of affectation,
the way of entertainment
or the specialist response.
With always the same outcome.
Dislike. Misunderstanding.
But I will do what I can.

(FCC 54)

No other contemporary poet, it may be said, has submitted himself to a stricter regimen nor been subject to so much misreading: Kinsella’s comprehensive vision may be dark but it is not nihilistic; it may be grim but it is not negating. The poetry, while often making severe demands, requires a similar discipline on the part of the reader if the poet’s “reading [of] the ground” is to be followed. That is not to say that he has always succeeded: of the two longer poems in From Centre City, “One Fond Embrace” suffers from “spleen,” as the poet acknowledges in conclusion, despite his decision to delete the more personal references present in the 1988 version, while “Open Court” offers only disgust at and rejection of contemporary literary Dublin. It may be that Jonathan Swift, who brings Blood and Family to a close, is a major driving force in both poems; certainly Kinsella’s saeva indignatio is at its most excoriating in them. However, he is indebted, in addition to Swift, to another eighteenth-century satirical master, this time from the Gaelic half of the Irish dual tradition: Brian Merriman. The 1988 version of “One Fond Embrace” (OFE 1988, 13) specifically alludes to Merriman’s masterpiece, The Midnight Court; “Open Court” pursues the judicial analogue; and both longer poems in From Centre City seek to reproduce “the fierce individual energy” (TNOBIV xxvi) for which Kinsella has praised Merriman’s poem. In “One Fond Embrace” he draws upon an even earlier Gaelic model, of medieval curse poetry, to condemn the developer-destroyers (a suitably paradoxical title) of Dublin’s architectural heritage: “May their sewers blast under them!” (FCC 3). However, his own “modest proposal” to deal with Ireland’s continuing partition is especially worthy of his ancestral exemplar, Swift:

everything West of the Shannon,
women and children included,
to be declared fair game.
Helicopters, rifles and night-glasses permitted.
The natives to have explosive
and ambush and man-trap privileges.
Unparalleled sport
and in the tradition
—the contemporary manifestation
of an evolving reality.

(9)

Yet for all his mordant anatomizing of Irish hypocrisy and cant, his principled scourging of contemporary Ireland’s lack of principle, “One Fond Embrace,” like “Open Court,” does not show Kinsella at his most impressive: his strengths have always been more clearly evident when anatomizing the self, although in the last resort private and public evil are inseparable.

While John Montague criticized Kinsella’s early poetry for being insufficiently located in time and place, a criticism that I have argued is only partly valid, From Centre City illustrates how certainly Kinsella has made his Dublin neighborhood a fitting context for his continuing moral and aesthetic struggles to elicit order and meaning. Percy Lane, Haddington Road, and the Grand Canal serve to bring the poet’s story up to date, with the volume concluding in his latest home in Co. Wicklow. Kinsella, like Joyce, has managed to trace journeys through a Dublin both exact in its geography and convincing in its symbolism. In Kinsella’s case, the landscapes are also populated by the same collection of disparate anatomical parts which, from A Technical Supplement onward, the poetry has attended to—face, eyes, lips, mouth, throat, hands—as if the geographical might have its corresponding elements in human anatomy, with both needing some encompassing structure. Kinsella’s readers have learnt from previous volumes his need to pursue such anatomizing, and expect to find the poet’s scrupulous attention to what makes a thing work. By this time too such parts have acquired significance as the poet’s symbolism has gained in strength and resonance. Furthermore, From Centre City continues the poet’s practice of echo and allusion, whether in self-reflexive acts of intertextuality or in acknowledgment of past masters, so that his entire corpus might inform, clarify, and extend his present meaning and enable his distinctive drama to unfold in increasing complexity and comprehensiveness. Whether quoting from himself or from his ancestral literary mentors, Kinsella establishes important connections which, while sometimes broken or fragmented, nevertheless make possible an enabling structure. Such structures help to sustain and make sense of one’s identity, constitute one’s inheritance, and clarify one’s participation in an organic process that has its origins in the very beginnings of time and space but that bears irrevocably upon the individual life.

Hence, in “At the Head Table,” while addressing the woman-mother-muse figure—“the source of trouble,” as Kinsella ironically puts it—the after-dinner speaker describes “the lovely beaker / with the slim amphibian handles” that he has made. In the manner of other Kinsella artists, the speaker, in describing the beaker, also captures the nature of the creative process itself: the cup has caused him “the greatest trouble,” brought him “the craftsman’s stoop,” yet, reflecting perfection, amplitude, measure, precision, and plenitude, the artefact’s “vital decoration” is

in fact a web of order
each mark accommodating
the shapes of all the others
with none at fault, or false;
a system of living images
making increased response
to each increased demand
in the eye of the beholder,
with a final full response
across the entire surface
—a total theme—presented
to a full intense regard:

(55)

The decoration reflects Kinsella’s purpose as a poet, his intent to weave “a web of order” and to construct “a system of living images” that require the reader’s “full intense regard.” With a sudden temporal shift, the poet brings his reader back once more to Amergin and the Sons of Mil, to the First People and the poet’s own origins, in part because The Book of Invasions has provided such a “web of order,” brought poet and reader “to a full intense regard,” but also because the occasion is Amergin’s famous first judgment in Ireland:

Nine waves out, a ship
lying low in the water,
battered from a journey,
the waves lapping around it
marked with the faint detail
of all the perils past.
The first firm footprints
emerging from the ocean …

(55–56)

Hence, with familiar self-deflation, Kinsella has the muse-mother hand down a more contemporary judgment—at best “A smile, dry and lipless”—when, with “stern features” and “lean arms,” she offers half-hearted acknowledgment of her poet-son’s limited achievement and his own contrary toast to “the Father” (Amergin). Equally characteristic also is the dance in which the limping poet—a further self-deflation—participates with “everyone in turn”: the phrase, as we have seen previously, denotes both inclusiveness and dynamic torsion or the “turn” in all things.

While Kinsella’s vision gains in inclusiveness, an essential feature of the process is nevertheless waste, a consumption that makes consummation possible. Consequently, in “One Fond Embrace,” those assembled around the protagonist’s Last Supper, another celebratory dinner, are advised:

Discern process. You know that,
mangled by it. We are all participants
in a process that requires waste.

(6)

The “waste” involves suffering and loss and accounts for Kinsella’s numerous wasted figures experiencing dispossession of identity or property or, more simply, having to enact rituals of departure. At times such waste seems simply negative—the hypocrisy, cant, deceit, begrudgery, selfishness, greed, conceit, common to public affairs and literary life. However, in “Night Conference, Wood Quay: 6 June 1979,” a poem written during the occupation of the Viking Wood Quay site in which the poet himself took part,² the developers and the members of Dublin Corporation are described as “white-cuffed marauders” with “Visages of rapine,” intent on destroying a priceless archaeological site. The irony is manifold: the latter-day marauders uncover a Viking past characterized by similar rapine and violence; and those defying the site’s “development” possess only a “mental force” gained in part from their experience of evil, past and present, as they face the abyss revealed by the bulldozers: “The half-dug pits and night drains brimmed with matter” (25). At such times waste constitutes a considerable positive.

The dark abyss must be traversed and the waste confronted and endured as the individual self participates in or falls short of meaning and fulfillment. The recurrent mouths experience and share that appetite, just as the equally recurrent lips and throat enable the poet to articulate meaning. The woman-mother-wife figure continues her vital role as seductress, Terrible Mother, lover, and muse in everyday settings like the kitchen and the bedroom. Hence in “Madonna,” the several scenes describing the wife figure climax in the cutting open of an orange and the making of a pot of tea, actions which in Kinsella’s hands lead to epiphanies, illuminations into the nature of things made possible by the wife-muse:

Cut and fold it open,
the thick orange, honey-coarse.
First blood: a saturated essence
tasted between the teeth.
I held the kettle out high
and emptied it
with a shrivelled hiss
boiling into the scalded pot.
A stubborn memory:
her tender, deliberate incursions.

(49)

We are reminded not only of the boy’s consumption of a pomegranate in “A Hand of Solo” (NLD 15) and the persistence of appetite in Kinsella’s world, but of the conjunction of appetite, whether gustatory or sexual, and the muse-prowler with “her ‘sudden and / peremptory incursions’” (A Technical Supplement, Poem XV, One 45).

From Centre City offers many such resonances not because the poet, imagination exhausted, recycles old experiences and poems, but because such echoes embody the very process he seeks to define and capture. His readers have previously been made aware of how relevant the practice of his intertextuality is to embodying his view of process. Moreover, it is such intertextuality that establishes continuity with the poet’s past work, that serves to acknowledge past masters—Keats, Auden, Jung, Yeats, Ó Rathaille—and that in turn provides a defining and inclusive structure. In this respect the sensation of touch and the imagery of hands make possible in an explicitly physical way the connectedness of data. For “hands” indicate or signify; they touch, make contact, connect, confer, transfer, take in hand, and verify. Hands themselves embody intertextuality. In “The Back Lane,” for example, the poet-protagonist abandons his writing, leaves his work-room, and walks through the night “into the world of waste.” His distinctive prayer defines precisely the self’s quest for meaning:

Lord, grant us a local watchfulness.
                    Accept us into that minority
driven toward a totality of response,
and I will lower these arms and embrace what I find.
                    —Embarrassed. Encountering my brother figure.
Startled likewise, in that posture
of seeming shyness, then glaring,
                    lips set and dark, hands down and averted
that have dipped in the same dish with mine.

(38)

Hands and appetite come together in an act of near-sacramental relevance. Just as the prayer is quintessentially Kinsella, so too is the embarrassment, the undercutting with which the poem concludes as the “brother figure” (whom Yeats might more properly describe as his daimonic self) is both encountered and denied: “But it was no one I knew. …”

While he may seek through intertextual reference to structure his work into coherent wholes, Kinsella also recognizes past exemplars. Sometimes his recognition is oblique: in “Rituals of Departure” (18), Keats surfaces through Kinsella’s rearrangement of the “Ode on Melancholy,” in which Keats’s “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu” becomes “Melancholy, retiring with her finger to our lips.” At other times, as in “Brothers in the Craft,” he returns to his beginnings as a poet in the 1950s, to the shadow of Yeats, and to the general principle of literary exemplars: “In the creative generations there is often / a conspiracy of the mature and the brilliant young, / a taking in hand, in hopes of a handing on.” Such inheritance is caught in imagery of the hand and, equally characteristically, the evolutionary process at work is of action and reaction, until “these settle in the medium in their turn.” The “medium”—meaning both “balance” and the “medium” of poetry itself—is attained through a synthesis or marriage of opposites. But it is a synthesis that maintains its own dynamic, as the ambivalent phrase “in their turn” suggests: the phrase refers to an order achieved or a circuit completed, but implicit also is a further “turning” in which the medium will be unsettled by its own perpetual torsion, and the whole business (or dance, as it is imaged elsewhere) once more set in motion. In the latter half of the poem the youthful Kinsella while prowling in Inchicore, pursuing his own dynamic, models himself more after Thomas Mann than Yeats—an acknowledgment of the German novelist’s early powerful influence—while the dead Irish poet’s presence or “animus” (an ironic conjunction of “soul” and “animosity”), pictured as perched Sweeney-like on a tree, is more keenly felt by Clarke in Templeogue than by Kinsella himself. Indeed, the “brothers in the craft” engage in conflict just as fratricidal, if less fatal, as that which Kinsella condemned earlier in “A Country Walk”:

Again and again, in the Fifties, “we” attended
Austin Clarke. He murmured in mild malice
and directed his knife-glance curiously amongst us.
Out in the dark, on a tree branch near the Bridge,
the animus of Yeats perched.
                                                            Another part of the City,
Tonio Kroeger, malodorous, prowled Inchicore.

(19)

Since the deaths of Yeats and Joyce (in 1939 and 1941, respectively), Irish poetry has had to come to terms with what Kinsella early identified as “the double shadow of Yeats and English verse.” We have seen Kinsella, like many of his contemporaries, turn to Joyce as the more liberating “Father of Authors,” finding Yeats’s major poetic achievement too dominating and his Anglo-Irishness inappropriate. What is especially striking about Kinsella’s latest work, however, is the reappearance of Yeats, now in the company of an exemplar whom Kinsella has long found more compatible: Aogán Ó Rathaille.

Kinsella had grouped the two poets together in a much earlier work, “The Irish Writer,” his 1966 MLA address in New York, in which he sought to define the particular nature of the Irish tradition and his own broken inheritance: “Yeats is isolated to begin with, like Aogán Ó Rathaille, at a turning point in history—there is a notable similarity in the way these poets regard their times: turning away from a miserable present and a terrible future to lament and celebrate an old nobility at the end of the line.”³ Moreover, as his recent statements indicate, Kinsella continues to reassess Yeats’s greatness as a poet and, as such, his place in and contribution to the dual Irish tradition.⁴ Indeed, rather than reacting against the older poet, Kinsella now appears to be engaged in assimilating him, with the late poems of Yeats taking on a more distinctly Kinsellan coloring. From Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) onward, Kinsella argues, “there is an outbreak of understanding in the poetry of the place of violence and the random at the heart of vital processes”—an observation that might legitimately be applied to Kinsella’s own work. Furthermore, he criticizes the debate over Yeats’s rightwing, sometimes fascist, politics, not because he shares Yeats’s views, but because it is “a trivialisation of great intellectual and imaginative activity” and “the avoidance of great poetry in the pursuit of argument.” Rather, he sees in “Yeats’s last books … a man at the approach of death finding the place of violence and meaninglessness in man’s best efforts,” a paradox again fundamental to Kinsella’s own awareness of the real. As he has come to reevaluate Yeats’s achievement, so too Kinsella has increasingly acknowledged the older poet’s place in relation to his own work: his ancestry or inheritance, for all their essential differences, includes both Joyce and Yeats.

Kinsella praises the last poems of Yeats for, among other things, a “perspective of an Irish tradition, complete with murderous ‘strangers.’” In Yeats’s “The Curse of Cromwell,” for example, Kinsella notes the presence of

Cromwell in a line of murderous strangers; the levelling wind howling through the ruins of a tradition; and Aogán Ó Rathaille—the last major poet in Irish, a poet of the dispossessed, and a beggar in the time of Swift—vanishing with an echo out of his own last poem:

rachad ’na bhfasc le searc na
laoch don chill,
na flatha fá raibh mo shean roimh éag
do Chríost.
And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride—
His fathers served their fathers before Christ
                    was crucified.(5)

Yeats and Ó Rathaille have come to constitute part of Kinsella’s poetic inheritance, an inheritance that has proved from the outset a matter of crucial significance. As we have seen, he has persistently striven to know “who he is and where he comes from”⁶—questions that, as a poet, touch upon his relationship with the Irish tradition and the several exemplars to whom he has turned for enablement and liberation.

Yeats appears most prominently in conjunction with Ó Rathaille in “At the Western Ocean’s Edge.” Distinct as the two men might be, they arrive at similar experiences from different sources, both coming to an understanding of the heroic nature. The poem may open by proclaiming one definition—“Hero as liberator”—in which the echo of Daniel O’Connell’s title suggests a public, political role, but it pursues a second, intrinsically tragic definition, of “the warrior marked by Fate,” whose struggle is internal, with his self. Certainly, Kinsella’s work has traced that same internal struggle to establish identity for himself and his people. One instance of such a hero is Cuchulain, who, Kinsella says in explicit reference to Yeats’s poem “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” “finding the foe inside his head, / … turned the struggle outward, against the sea.” In Cuchulain Yeats found an image of the conflict within himself and, in a battle Kinsella has himself continued in his own time, used the mythic hero “as a second shadow / in his own sour duel with the middle classes”:

Yeats discovered him through Lady Gregory
and found him helpful as a second shadow
in his own sour duel with the middle classes.
He grew to know him well in his own right
—mental strife, renewal in reverse,
emotional response, the revelation.

(26)

Yeats gives way once more, however, to another forebear, Aogán Ó Rathaille, a poet closer to Kinsella in both temperament and participation in the Irish tradition. Living in poverty in the Dingle Peninsula—“at the Western ocean’s edge”—in geographical, physical, economic, and cultural extremity, Ó Rathaille is brought to a similar revelation, taking on the sea in much the same way as Cuchulain. What Kinsella, like Yeats, finds praiseworthy is heroic endurance in the face of chaos combined with a persistent, contrary rage for order; he believes that this combination is at the heart of understanding and of the poetic or creative process. Ó Rathaille thus becomes an ancestral familiar, an exemplar whose work elicits the contemporary poet’s approval:

Aogán Ó Rathaille felt their forces meeting
at the Western ocean’s edge
—the energy of chaos and a shaping
counter-energy in throes of balance;
the gale wailing inland off the water
arousing a voice responding in his head,
storming back at the waves with their own force
in a posture of refusal, beggar rags
in tatters in a tempest of particulars.
A battered figure.
                              Any force remaining
held in waves of threat inside the mind.
As who can not confirm, that set his face
beyond the ninth shadow, into dead calm.
Dame Kindness, her bowels torn.
The stranger waiting on the steel horizon.

(26)

Ó Rathaille may be “A battered figure” (the Personal Places version read “wasted”): we know that in later years, dispossessed and living in internal exile, he suffered considerable poverty and hardship. At the same time we know, with Kinsella’s worker in mirror, that “The process is elaborate, and wasteful” and that “out of its waste matter, / it [the “work in hand”] should emerge light and solid” (NLD 56). We might question why Kinsella replaced the original adjective, “wasted”—so quintessentially a Kinsellan quality—with the more Yeatsian “battered.” It may be that the original, despite its precedents in Kinsella’s work, could too easily be misread as “squandered,” “spent,” “ineffectual”; “battered” certainly reinforces the Yeatsian analogue. In any case, Ó Rathaille, like Cuchulain or Lear, confronts chaos and, in suffering waste or battering, embodies the very process he seeks to understand. It may be that Kinsella has turned Ó Rathaille into an image of himself, much as Yeats did with his own personae. It may be also that the figures in the concluding lines—man as a beggar, Dame Kindness, and the ominous stranger—are a fusion of King Lear, Yeats’s tattered coat, and Auden’s Dame Kind and Stranger, with the last suggesting more a Cromwellian murderousness than the Stuart Pretender’s welcome return.⁷ But the argument is distinctively Kinsella’s. With all such exemplars, including Yeats, Kinsella has reached that degree of maturity in which he can assimilate without loss of identity.

Be that as it may, Joyce and others like Auden or Ó Rathaille remain more enabling voices, more compatible forebears than Yeats. It would be a misreading of Kinsella not to recognize that other exemplars have played a more explicitly positive and dominant role in his poetic development. At the same time, Kinsella’s own disclaimers at the outset of his career, his subsequent statements about Yeats and his isolation in the Irish tradition, and his most recent discussion of Yeats’s understanding of violence and the random, need to be put in the context of his own work, with its recurrent echoes of and parallels with the older poet. What is significant about these late poems, in addition to their intrinsic accomplishment, is that they show not only Kinsella’s continuing reference back to Yeats—references which in fact he never entirely renounced—but his gradual assimilation, even appropriation, of Yeats as a recognizable brother in the craft with whose inheritance he can now live comfortably, without fear of being swamped or overshadowed. That appropriation, I suggest, is itself a measure of Kinsella’s own poetic majority and achievement.

I have argued that Ó Rathaille comes to embody the very process he seeks to understand. Such embodiment is the heroic version of the aesthetic after which Kinsella as a poet strives. “I am looking,” Kinsella has declared, “for totality of imaginative response with the merely linguistic characteristics deleted so that one is brought closer and closer to the data.”⁸ His technical development—from the early lyrical poems, through the narrative and meditative poems of Downstream and Nightwalker, to the dense, intertextual, polyphonic later poems—has proved necessary in order more adequately to articulate the data. A poem thus becomes, like Ó Rathaille in “At the Western Ocean’s Edge,” an embodiment, in which the data’s “form and unity” and those of the poem itself most closely coincide. Samuel Beckett’s comment on Joyce’s Work in Progress—“His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”⁹—thus looks increasingly applicable to Kinsella. For much of his writing career, he has sought to exorcise the ghost of Yeats and, through the liberating example of Joyce, to evolve a style that accommodates the punishing integrity and inclusiveness of his vision. He has spoken out against “narrowness” of vision, whether that which “sees nothing beyond ‘Anglo-Irish’” or that which abjures “the English element in the Irish inheritance.”¹⁰ It is fitting, therefore, to see Kinsella writing at the height of his powers; embracing not just his long-standing exemplar, Joyce, but his shadow, Yeats; and, through the figure of Aogán Ó Rathaille, resolving, at least to his own satisfaction, the dual nature of the Irish tradition.

Such resolution, however, should not be misread as implying any continuity between the English and the Gaelic halves of the Irish tradition. “Nothing could be less likely. Ireland’s history discounts continuity of any kind,” he has pronounced flatly.¹¹ Nevertheless, what Kinsella is drawn to and which he believed was exemplified in his edition, The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, is that “there is a poetic response to the complex of experience and it exists in two languages. The two bodies of response interact among themselves in some extraordinary ways.”¹² The same interaction occurs in Kinsella’s bringing together of Yeats and Ó Rathaille, resulting in what he sought from the beginning: a poetry that can say and do anything, that responds in abundant, consummate, and convincing ways to modern experience. That in itself, I would suggest, is a major achievement and has made him an essential voice of our time.

Notes

1. O’Driscoll, “Interview.” 65.

2. An earlier version of the poem, entitled “Night Conference, 6 June 1979,” appeared in the ephemeral news-sheet, Wood Quay Occupation News, no. 2 (12 June 1979). For an account of the dispute and of Kinsella’s participation in it, see Viking Dublin Exposed: The Wood Quay Saga, ed. John Bradley (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1984).

3. Kinsella, “The Irish Writer,” 62.

4. “W.B. Yeats, the British Empire, James Joyce, and Mother Grogan,” Irish University Review 22 (Spring-Summer 1992): 69–79. Subsequent quotations are from this article.

5. Ibid., 76.

6. Kinsella, “The Irish Writer,” 57.

7. King Lear, 3.4.28; W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”; W. H. Auden, “The Watershed” and “On This Island” (for “Stranger”) and “Sext,” “Dame Kind,” and elsewhere (for “Dame Kindness”), Collected Poems, ed. Mendelson, 41, 112–13, 478, 503–4.

8. O’Driscoll, “Interview,” 65.

9. “Dante … Bruno, Vico … Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris, 1929/London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 14.

10. Kinsella, “Another Country. …” 178.

11. O’Driscoll, “Interview,” 64.

12. Ibid., 64–65.