[In the following review, Skloot discusses Kinsella's literary career and artistic development in the context of Poems from Centre City.]

‘There are established personal places / that receive our lives’ heat / and adapt in their mass, like stone,” Irishman Thomas Kinsella says in one of the new poems in his 1994 collection entitled From Centre City. This is true about actual places he focuses on, such places as “The Stable,” “The Back Lane,” “Departure Platforms,” meeting rooms, literary pubs or the childhood home. It is also true about places within the self where the poet habitually retreats, as well as the “Peppercanister” (St. Stephen’s Church) and the ongoing poetic venture with which he has long been occupied—the growing mass of interconnected work he has built with each new publication.

In “At the Head Table,” when the speaker calls his work of creating beakers and cups “a system of living images / making increased response / to each increased demand / in the eye of the beholder,” he might well be describing Kinsella’s own work. Ever adapting, it has nevertheless accrued a solidity, like stone or ceramic ware, and the environment in which this has been allowed to happen is one that the poet rigidly controls.

A science scholarship student while at University College, Dublin, an administrator in Ireland’s Department of Finance for some 15 years and a man who by skill and temperament is driven toward “management of material / in all the fine requirements,” Kinsella has spent his creative career exploring the “will that gropes for / structure.” He has always been clear about what drives him: “Here the passion is in the putting together,” he wrote in a poem from the early 1970’s: “I tinker with the things that dominate me / as they describe their random / persistent coherences.” What has dominated him in recent years is what has dominated him almost from the start: “a structure for my mess of angers,” as he says in a poem from his new book, or examining the way “Versing, like an exile, makes / A virtuoso of the heart,” as he said in a poem from his first book—structure for the essentially unstructurable.

Despite his devotion to organization and control, Kinsella has turned out to be the Bard of Chaos, a weaver whose “web of order” must be constantly rewoven to contain the resistant, erosive world he inhabits. In his quest for order he has gone from being a poet of elegant craft and traditional form to one of structural innovation and incompleteness as the order he seeks, the “total theme—presented / to a full intense regard,” proves ever more internal and elusive.

On the last page of From Centre City, Kinsella presents a man turning his back on the city and all it entails. It is not only the accurate image of a poet retiring, choosing to take up country life in a small village in the Wicklow Mountains, it also captures Kinsella’s present situation in Irish letters:

I have known the hissing assemblies.
The preference for the ease of the spurious
—the measured poses and stupidities.
On a fragrant slope descending into
the fog
over our foul ascending city
I turned away in refusal,
and held a handful of high grass
sweet and grey to my face.

At 66, and after more than four decades of continuous publication, Kinsella occupies a peculiar place in his country’s literary life. Emerging as a new voice in the late 1950’s, he was the “favored one” in the scattered family of Irish poetry, often referred to as the successor to William Butler Yeats. But despite his position at center stage among “the hissing assemblies,” he “turned away in refusal” repeatedly—leaving the country for several years during the height of his renown, abandoning the traditional way of writing poetry that he had mastered so young, establishing a publishing house, the Peppercanister Press, which issued only his own work. Although he eventually returned to Ireland, he has slowly been nudged aside like a respected but crotchety uncle. Despite steadily producing brilliant work and being engaged in a long-term project comparable only to Ezra Pound’s Cantos among 20th-century poets. Kinsella’s reputation—at the moment it should be brightest—is in danger of eclipse.

Kinsella’s early poetry that attracted so much acclaim was orderly, elegant in language and technique, traditionally controlled. He wrote lyrics such as “Another September” (1958), which opens with this eight-line stanza:

Dreams fled away, this country bedroom,
raw
With the touch of the dawn, wrapped in a minor
peace.
Hears through an open window the garden draw
Long pitch black breaths, lay bare its apple
trees
Ripe pear trees, bramble, windfall-sweetened
soil,
Exhale rough sweetness against the starry slates.
Nearer the river sleeps St. Johns, all toil
Locked fast inside a dream with iron gates.

Many characteristic Kinsella moves and themes are already present here. The verse is tightly rhymed, exquisitely balanced between abstractions and specifics, rooted in place yet easily universal; the metrics and pacing are managed with authority as in the fourth line, where the breath is slowed by the accumulation of stressed syllables and punchy consonants, then relaxed with a return of iambics and open vowels.

The influence of Yeats and W. H. Auden was clear in such early work as “Fifth Sunday After Easter” (“April’s sweet hand in the margins betrayed / Her character in late cursive daffodils: / A gauche mark, but beautiful: a maid.”). But Kinsella’s voice quickly established itself over these echoes. The anthology piece “Mirror in February,” from the 1962 collection Downstream, marked the height of Kinsella’s achievement in the lyric mode:

The day dawns with scent of must and
rain.
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed—my
brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy—
I towel my shaven lip and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

Kinsella has long been concerned with the struggle for continuity and stability in the face of overwhelming erosion. He focused his attention on issues of married love, the artistic act and the history of his family and country, regardless of the form or scope of his poems. In addition, there was always an impulse to work in a longer, meditative framework, and it became increasingly attractive to Kinsella in his mid-30’s. His 1968 collection Nightwalker and Other Poems, consolidating his reputation internationally, included both the 400-line title poem and the 225-line “Phoenix Park,” along with a 161-line poem called “The Shoals Returning,” a 134-line poem called “A Country Walk,” as well as “Downstream,” a mere 83 lines long. Almost nothing rhymed, in these poems; they were less arranged, more open. They were interior to the point of being subterranean, Joycean rather than Yeatsean, yet they included more of the outside world than ever before. Things welled up and demanded to be included in poems that would have ruled them out before. History, politics, literary reference. The poems teemed.

Kinsella was moving toward a poetry in which, he has said, nothing should come between the poet and his material, between the things perceived and the perceiving self. No inherited forms, no imposed structure, no real endings or beginnings. “I have never seen,” Kinsella said in an interview with John F. Deane, editor of Dublin’s Dedalus Press, “why a poem need end absolutely with its final line. It can lie in wait, with the dynamics available.” As though to underscore the point, Kinsella began his 1988 book Blood & Family with the same long poem, “The Messenger,” which concluded his previous book, Peppercanister Poems, 1972–1978. New poems often echoed back to earlier poems.

Those 10- and 15-page poems Kinsella wrote at mid-career were to look like short ones compared with the book-length sequences such as “Notes from the Land of the Dead and One,” or 25- and 30-page poems like “St. Catherine’s Clock” and “A Technical Supplement.” Like Pound, Kinsella has in many ways been writing one long, ongoing poem since 1965 or so, an exploration of “how the whole thing works.”

At this juncture in his career—the late 1960’s—Kinsella was in self-imposed exile after a 20-year civil service career in Ireland’s Ministry of Finance, living in the small town of Carterville in southern Illinois, far outside the framework of his entire previous adult life, and clearly on a journey. He was turning his back on everything that had brought his work to public approval and rejecting the imposition of order. Instead, as he later said, “I believe the significant work begins in eliciting order from actuality.” He also has commented that it is “out of ourselves and our wills that the chaos came, and out of ourselves that some order will have to be constructed.” For Kinsella, this meant abandoning such traditional ordering devices as meter and rhyme, then narrative, eventually even rejecting beginnings and endings. Drawing the reader into the communication loop, relying upon the reader’s immersion and involvement to complete the act, Kinsella was committed to changing the essence of how a poem worked.

From Centre City is both angrier and more mellow than what has come before. “Better is a handful with quietness / than both hands full / with travail and vexation of spirit,” he says in the invocation to Part Three of the book. More accessible than its predecessor Blood & Family, From Centre City has a charm and cohesiveness that nicely balance its despair over waste and corruption, “this sick place” with its entropic urge toward fracturing and disorder. It is almost as though getting out of the city, being surrounded at last by ravens and grass and “dry trees standing quiet in their own grain,” has provided a tentative sort of hope, or at least a personal balm against “The Process as it hath revealed / its Waste on high.”

But it takes him a while to get there. The book opens with an acrimonious but self-mocking poem in 96 tercets entitled “One Fond Embrace.” It is a splenetic balancing of the literary record, which Kinsella labels “a private accounting,” where those figures from his past who are now brought to the speaker’s table are invited to “Take one another / and eat.” It begins:

Enough
is enough:
poring over that organic pot.
I knuckled my eyes. Their drying jellies
answered with speckles and images.
I leaned back and stretched
and embraced all
this hearth and home
echoing with the ghosts
of prides and joys,
bicycles and holy terrors,
our grown and scattered loves.

The scene is a familiar Kinsellan moment, going back to “Baggot Street Deserta” from 1958, as the poet sits back exhausted from his writing (“that organic pot”) and lets his thoughts run loose over the themes of art, love and place. He considers his Dublin neighborhood, “the brick walls / of this sagging district, against which / it alerts me to knock my head,” its sordid history of religious and economic struggle (“Our neighbourhood developer / thinking big in his soiled crombie”) and the despoiling of its character (“planners of the wiped slate / labouring painstaking over a bungled city / to turn it into a zoo”) until he gets himself sufficiently agitated (“May their sewers blast under them!”) to seek escape (“And I want to throw my pen down. / And I want to throw my self down / and hang loose over some vault of peace”). However, the sour mood has taken too deep a hold; looking out the window at “Bright gulls, gracefully idling / in the blue and wholesome heights / above our aerials,” at “fatted magpies” and invisible grey maggots and a “baby spider / so swift / on the painted sill” only leads him to think of his fellow citizens with their “grasping manners” and “natural behaviour,” and then of his “friends and others, of whose presences, deteriorating / here, there and elsewhere / I am acutely aware.”

So begins an indignant summoning forth, person by person, of nearly two dozen such unnamed friends and others—literary, political, bureaucratic, religious—for their fond embrace (“Here’s a hug while the mood is on me”) as their true characters are revealed and old scores are settled. For example: “You, peremptory and commanding so long ago, / that so swiftly and methodically / discovered your limits.” Or “You, in morose inadequacy, / settling your contemporaries in order of precedence, / denying what you still might: discern.” Mean and often funny in the way that good satire can be, the poem is saved from being burned in its own acids by its ironic foundation and knowing all along that it is wildly overboard (“there is more spleen / than good sense in all of this, I admit”). Besides, it has an ultimate source that is deeper than merely personal sourness.

Indeed, the deepest disgust is saved for perpetrators of the unceasing internecine troubles that have beset Ireland for so long: “remember we are dealing with the slow to learn, / whose fathers, wiping the blood up after yours, / fought the wrong Civil War.” Finally the ranting culminates in a prayer, informed by the harshest of realities and still tottering on the balance point of anger, that both Catholic and Protestant somehow learn to co-exist: “Thou that smilest however / on the pious of both persuasions / closest to the sources of supply / guide us and save.” It even appears now that the prayer is being answered. From Centre City offers movements that modulate the old anger, encouraging the reader to see it as part of a full and honest response to reality.

“One Fond Embrace” is followed by a sequence of nine poems rooted in the intimate agonies of conflict, love, death and dislocation. They explore moments of change that have become critical touchstones in the poet’s life, epiphanic points of measure returned to in memory—a critical meeting, the surprise of passion, relocation, aging, the deaths of family and older writers, violent conflict. As people change, so do such moments, which “absorb in their changes / the radiance of change in us, / and give it back / to the darkness of our understanding.” We evolve, of course, and our perceptions and memories alter, but Kinsella’s point is that a dynamic process is at work between self and world, “the energy of chaos and a shaping / counter-energy in throes of balance.” A reader becomes exposed to the poet’s obsessive watchfulness, what Kinsella calls “The Impulse, ineradicable” in the poem “Apostle of Hope,” a drive for “Scrutiny; / manipulation toward some kind / of understanding.” It is a theme that has been at the core of his work from the beginning.

A grim sequence of poems, with anguish and loss dominant. In a different order and some in different forms, these poems appeared as the 1990 Peppercanister pamphlet entitled Personal Places. The one that is new is also the centerpiece of the section, a powerful three-part poem entitled “In Memory,” which takes place during the funeral of an older and respected poet—probably Valentin Iremonger—and shows Kinsella mixing a structural and tonal elegance reminiscent of his earlier work with the directness, interiority and shifting surface of his recent work. That the dead writer bears similarities to the mourning poet is made strikingly clear—like the younger Kinsella, who served his country in the Ministry of Finance while also forging his identity as a poet. Iremonger had a career in public service too, eventually becoming Ireland’s Ambassador to India and to Luxembourg while remaining active as a poet and editor.

Among the several poems in the book that concern moments of change, there is a moving one about the demise of a local stable and its dray (“he wasn’t gone / a month when the local roughs were in”). Birds outside the window, the bell on Haddington Road, mysterious strangers, “the remains of a cement mash / emptied direct on the clay” of the back lane which reveals “the slovenliness of the City and its lesser works”—these poems are full of curious homages to a way of life. They lead him to utter a poetic credo in the form of a prayer: “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.”

The final section of From Centre City includes “Open Court,” another long poem about literary ambition, this one written in couplets, a form he referred to in “The Stranger” as his “pulse of doggerel case.” Subtitled “a fragment,” it is nevertheless 167 lines and, like Finnegans Wake, neither begins at the beginning nor ends at the end and is like spending a long session in a pub crammed with loud, washed-up writers emitting their “chorus of disgust:” It is less savage than “One Fond Embrace” because less intimate, distanced by its form and mocking humor, as though the poet has finally escaped a danger zone where he might be hurt.

Which, in fact, he has. The book ends with a series of three short poems that find the poet out of centre city, discovering fresh metaphors for his familiar themes. In the first, the poet is caught at another key juncture of transition: “I left the road where a stile enters the wood.” Here the discovery of a dead bat (which, like inspiration, like the poet in the poem, is “meant only to be half seen / quick in the half light” while it is “snapping at the invisible”) allows for the sort of vigorous connection that promises a new focus and vigor in the work. In the second poem, “Our raven couple / flying together, up toward their place / on the high rock shoulder” suggests hope for the continued exploration of his theme of love.

From Centre City enacts the very process its poems speak about. Moving from deep-rooted harshness to tentative grace, evolving out of the same material seen in different ways, the work continues to flower as it remains open to the world, total in response. However fashions may change regarding poetic reputation, it seems likely that Kinsella’s unique voice will manage to be heard in the only way it can—on its own terms.