Few who follow Irish poetry with any attention would question that Thomas Kinsella is a major figure, if not a major force, on the poetic and imaginative landscape of our time. He is widely admired for the persistence and persistent individuality of his vision. At the same time, however, most readers would admit that his work yields less in the way of sheer pleasure than does that of most of his important compatriots. Although he can produce haunting effects, by and large he refuses to cultivate the genial bonhomie of Seamus Heaney, the formal grace of Mahon, Murphy, and Longley, or the provocative playfulness of McGuckian and Muldoon. In short, he is the sort of writer who is generally more valued for the meaning of his work than for the work itself. What, then, are the qualities of his work that claim our attention? The publication of Blood and Family, his first full-length collection in nearly ten years, affords an opportunity to reassess a poetic career now in its fourth decade.

When Kinsella began publishing in the 1950s, the reigning Irish poets of the day were Austin Clarke, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and, not least, Patrick Kavanaugh—all formidable and accomplished writers, if under-rated at the time, and all since canonized to some extent in Ireland’s literary history. John Montague and Richard Murphy were just emerging. Montague, Murphy, and Kinsella are now the bridge between the younger poets (Heaney, although he is now in middle age, and his followers) on the one hand and the more rigorously austere Clarke and his generation on the other. It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that we find Kinsella’s work informed by an obsessive tension between sensuality (of language, perception, and experience) and ascetism or austerity (again, of language, perception, and experience).

If pleasure in language for its own sake is to be taken as a central element throughout Irish literature, Kinsella subverts this tradition. In much of his work, there is a sense of speech halted, of desire unfulfilled. Like that of Geoffrey Hill, the British poet to whom he is most often compared, Kinsella’s work is marked by a fundamental mistrust of language and of its effects. He seems to be carrying on an internal dialogue rather than a dialogue with the reader. But his writing is less concerted and, taken as a whole, less concentrated than that of Hill and of Charles Tomlinson, another British poet whom he in some respects (not least in the longevity of his talent) resembles. Seamus Deane has suggested that Kinsella’s overriding theme is the burden of history-as-nightmare. Certainly he is the most European, the least parochial, of contemporary Irish poets—and the most naked, the least adorned. At times, as in Nightwalker and Notes from the Land of the Dead, for example, he is driven to apologize for Ireland’s dissociation from the mainstream of twentieth-century European life—not least its dissociation from World War II, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Painfully conscious of his country’s place in the backwater of twentieth-century history (the continuing Troubles in the North notwithstanding), he feels compelled to project his consciousness into the heart of central Europe’s history; yet this identification is never literal. Whatever his personal reasons for his departure from Ireland—he lives for much of the year in the United States, and teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia—metaphorically, Kinsella’s flight from Ireland is a flight from provincialism into the universal.

Kinsella has identified his themes—indeed, his preoccupations—as “love, death, and the creative act.” He is concerned most with “persons and relationships, places and objects, seen against the world’s processes of growth, maturing, and extinction … questions of value and order, seeing the human function (in so far as it is not simply to survive the ignominies of existence) as the eliciting of order from experience …” Certainly these concerns are not unique, and Kinsella is not alone in exploring them. The throwaway parenthetical phrase, however, indicates the bleakness of his obsession: he writes out of the conviction that what he writes is necessary, but with little hope that it will change the world or measure up to his own standard of poetic success. The hallmark of his literary career is his persistence in the face of the fear of failure.

Early and late, Kinsella’s poetry is, like Larkin’s, a poetry of deprivation:

Now, before I sleep,
My heart is cut down:
Nothing, nothing
—Poetry nor love—achieving.

—“Night Songs”

The other props are gone.
Sighing in one another’s
Iron arms, propped above nothing,
We praise Love the limiter.

—“Je t’adore”

… it grows dark and we stumble
in gathering ignorance
in a land of loss
and unfulfillable desire.

—“The Land of Loss”

But while Larkin couches his deprivation in elegiac tones, Kinsella—especially in his later work—attempts to strike a more cosmic note, imbues his verse with a more feverish apprehension. Throughout his work, he takes exile as the supreme metaphor for loss, terror, speechlessness. Anguish is the central emotion in his poetry; and his central image (though not exclusively so, as we shall see) is darkness. His mode is endurance rather than triumph or transcendence. He works, quite deliberately, in isolation; if he is at all conscious of his readers it is only of the fact that they are few and are merely incidental to the creation of the verse, that they are bystanders rather than partners. Kinsella displays no interest in writing a perfect poem or even a polished poem; his intention is neither to impress nor even to persuade, but simply to stand witness to the movement of his own mind.

Kinsella’s poetic achievement cannot be properly measured in terms of the sum of its individual parts. He would not have us judge his poems as independent texts, but rather as imperfect pieces that find their significance only within a larger design. As he himself has said, “the things behind form were what bothered me … the sequence rather than the finished single object.” By definition, such poems cannot stand on their own; they are fragments that the reader must piece together as best he can. A Kinsella poem is neither self-contained nor self-referential; nor is it a linguistic artifact to be deconstructed. Poetry, for Kinsella, is not so much a product as a process of thought and of discovery. One senses, as in Pound, whom he admires, that the poem (or the sequential succession of poems) is merely a map to the thought and experience that lies behind and beneath it, always just beyond the reader’s grasp. A mature Kinsella poem does not pin down a meaning but rather chases it. “Here the passion is in the putting together,” he declares in the somewhat fleshless and yet sensual “Worker in Mirror, At His Bench” (New Poems 1973), and continues:

Yes, I suppose I am appalled
at the massiveness of others’ work.
But not deterred; I have leaned my shed
against a solid wall. Understanding smiles.
I tinker with the things that dominate me
as they describe their random
persistent coherences …
clean surfaces shift
and glitter among themselves …
Pause. We all are vile …
Let the voice die away.

The odd phrase “understanding smiles” may be the key here, and it works in at least two ways: “Understanding” (an abstract noun, and capitalized) smiles upon the poet; and the poet, not without a touch of irony, understands the smiles (both bemused and knowing) of his readers. The persistent refrain that haunts the third and final section of this poem is the single word “forgotten.” Often, as it is here, a Kinsella poem is a fragile attempt to recollect a dream, or to beget some realization of a better life out of a dream. But just as often, in the same poems, as I have suggested, the poet’s vision is begotten in darkness and remains there, lodged in the recesses of memory. Kinsella seems to want to declare, with George Garrett’s Salome, “I had a dream of purity / And I have lived in the wilderness ever since.” But even the ability to utter this sort of wild and blinding recognition eludes him; the voice is always dying away. It is a brave and startling confession for the maker, whether poet or potter, to acknowledge that he merely tinkers with the things (themes) that dominate him, rather than mastering them. The randomness of his success too is an admission of the maker’s impotence rather than a demonstration of his power.

Again and again, Kinsella’s poems work out to no resolution; they do not conclude with the force of Yeats’s closed boxes. While Yeats’s famous rhetorical closing questions seem to imply a deeply-held belief, Kinsella’s stuttering interrogatives dissolve into silence, not even evoking an echo. Future scholars, I think, may find a fertile subject for doctoral theses in Kinsella’s use of ellipses, his halting, unfinished utterances. This lack of resolution (though not of tension) in the poems of his maturity is allied to, and helps explain, his apparent lack of interest in form and in the music that most readers expect to find in verse.

What most disturbs Kinsella’s reader is the poet’s apparent refusal to specify the actual setting of his experience. Kinsella’s poems, unlike those of most of his compatriots, resist being rooted in real, perceptible places, but are first and foremost manifestations of the poet’s inner life, his troubled consciousness. When we read Heaney we see a real alder branch; for all its moral and metaphorical implications, Mahon’s disused shed in County Wexford is quite solid, as are Montague’s dolmens and old people, Murphy’s curraghs and islands, and even (in spite of her quicksilver imagination) McGuckian’s blue houses. With Kinsella, we can never quite see where we are; the places and events in his poems rarely seem individual and experienced, but are generalized and projected. Here, it seems to me, is the central paradox of all confessional poetry as such. The landscape of “Downstream,” for example—a typical Kinsella landscape—partakes of the burden of history as the poet imagines ”nude heards [sic] of the damned” that move in a “barren world obscurely lit / By tall chimneys flickering in their pall.” These images of the Holocaust are imagined as he glides downstream (on what nameless river?) “in the mirrored dusk,” past a “ghostly bank” and through “dark woods,” “the alleys of the wood.” The Dantesque imagery is obvious, but the impact is muted precisely because the imagery is at once so general and so private.

In his tortured, tortuous syntax Kinsella becomes both the pursuer and the pursued. The terms in which he works are terms of both engagement and escape, exile and return. As Deane again has suggested, Kinsella’s poems move in the uneasy realm where nature and culture overlap and co-exist—nature being what we are and culture what we have made of ourselves.

What I have been describing, however, is Kinsella’s later verse—that is, his writing over the last twenty or twenty-five years. His early work, on the other hand, in retrospect points to this sort of development but does not entirely predict it. Another September, for example, is freighted with elegant lyrics that strain to simulate an early-Yeatsian romanticism, with its languid rhetoric, as in this stanza from “Death of a Queen”::

They sent counsellors and music
Out across the promontory of her grief;
And anger, after a while,
Was released, shouldering like a bull;
But startle or sweeten to life
Her eyes, streaming with memory, could not.

(That shouldering, surely, must be a misprint for shuddering?) And this stanza from “The Travelling Companion”:

‘End and done with’ never ceases,
Constantly the heart releases
           Wild geese to the past.
Look, how they circle poignant places,
Falling to sorrow’s fowling-pieces
           With soft plumage ahast.

Yet even here he is beginning to labor under the burden of history, saying, with Stephen Dedalus, that history is a nightmare from which he has yet to awaken.

Kinsella’s lyric phase culminates in Nightwalker and Other Poems. Here, in such poems as “Tara,” the lyrical impulse is married to a specificity of detail, a carefully modulated diction, and a formal grace—qualities often conspicuously absent from his later sequences:

The mist hung on the slope, growing whiter
On the thin grass and dung by the mounds;
It hesitated at the dyke, among briars.
Our children picked up the wrapped flasks, capes and baskets
And we trailed downward among whins and thrones
In a muffled dream, guided by slender axe-shapes.
Our steps scattered on the soft turf, leaving
No trace, the children’s voices like light.
Low in the sky behind us, a vast silver shield
Seethed and consumed itself in the thick ether.
A horse appeared at the rampart like a ghost,
And tossed his neck at ease, with a hint of harness.

I quote this poem in full because, although not wholly representative of his early work, it suggests the direction he could have taken. At the same time, embedded in it are indications of the line he was to follow shortly hereafter. It is a farewell, both personal and poetic, literal and figurative, to the Ireland of “mist … on the slope.” It announces Kinsella’s departure from “ease,” his growing recognition of a hostile or at least indifferent natural world that seethes and consumes not only itself but those who inhabit it, whether wild or human. It is a world the poet can only apprehend by surrendering to the unconscious, the “muffled dream.”

The recurring and dominating image of Kinsella’s darkest poetry is not darkness itself, but the human mouth. Indeed, from the mid-sixties on, his work is obsessed with what Seamus Heaney, later and in another context, calls “the government of the tongue;” or, if you will, the word made flesh. It is the mouth that, as it eats, tastes, speaks, sings, and kisses, creates our greatest intimacy; but the same mouth gnaws and devours; it cries from unsatisfied hunger, and is a portal of decay. Thus, in “Phoenix Park,” “A child plucks death and tastes it.” “Nightwalker” begins, “I only know things seem and are not good. / A brain in the dark, and bones, out exercising / Shadowy flesh; fitness for the soft belly, / Fresh air for lungs that take no pleasure any longer.” In “Ritual of Departure,” “I scoop at the earth, and sense famine, a first / Sourness in the clay. The roots tear softly.” And in “Phoenix Park,” again, the poet dreams of

A blind human face burrowing in the void,
Eating new tissue down into existence
Until every phantasm—all that can come—
Has roamed in flesh and vanished, or passed inward
Among the echoing figures to its place,
And this live world is emptied of its hunger
While the crystal world, undying, crowds with light,
Filling the cup … That there is one last phantasm
Who’ll come painfully in old lewd nakedness
—Loose needles of bone coming out through his fat—
Groping with an opposite, equal hunger,
Thrusting a blind skull from its tatters of skin
As from a cowl, to smile in understanding
And total longing …

John Montague, generally an admirer of Kinsella, has expressed reservations about the “Gothic extravagances” in Wormwood, Kinsella’s sequence about married love, and his first foray into the sequence form. In Montague’s view, Kinsella’s feverish rhetoric is pitched beyond the weight of the subject matter; the poet faces his own extinction too self-consciously; the poem’s subjectivity almost precludes the reader’s involvement. Edna Longley, too, has taken Kinsella to task for what she regards as indulgent self-involvement in many of these long sequences. Regarding “Nightwalker,” I would only add that indeed, although the poet is under no obligation to prove that his assertions are true, if his poems are to have potency they cannot rely solely upon passionate generalizations nor, on the other hand, upon observations that are singularly personal. Eliot knew this, of course, and so, in his way, did Larkin, as do the most rigorous and uncompromising of our living poets, Hill and Mahon and Milosz. One never feels that they are straining for effect; their moral angst is expressed as authentically and as artfully as it is felt. Kinsella’s passion is never in question, but his anxiety and indignation can undermine the poetry. In his effort to quarry order out of chaos, chaos often seems to have the upper hand. This fragmentation persists to an even greater extreme in Notes from the Land of the Dead. Here again, the double imagery of the mouth and darkness predominates; indeed, it is introduced in the first sentence: “A snake out of the void moves in my mouth, sucks / at triple darkness.”

Kinsella’s most recent book brings together the contents of five limited-edition pamphlets previously brought out by his own Peppercanister Press. Thematically, it breaks no new ground; formally, it extends his experiment with language and the possibilities of poetic utterance in ways that would not have seemed alien to Pound. There are moments of great intensity and even of poetic beauty in these poems, but, in spite of Kinsella’s strategy, these moments never quite connect with each other to produce a cumulative effect that transcends them. Yet I would not be surprised to find, on subsequent readings, that this has been his strategy all along. The fragmentation and the grimness of his vision resist the steady and civilizing cadences of the iambic line.

I would not venture to predict the shape of Thomas Kinsella’s next book. I suspect that his best work is behind him—but only because what he has already achieved could not have come easily and without cost. What I do know is that Kinsella is entirely his own person. Despite its quirks and idiosyncrasies, its flaws and excesses, his poetry is informed by a fierce intelligence. Kinsella is one of our few authentic explorers of the heart of human darkness. He will always go his own way.

Works Cited

Deane, Seamus. “Thomas Kinsella: ‘Nursed out of Wreckage.’” Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980. London: Faber & Faber, 1985: Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1987.

Haffenden, John. Interview with Thomas Kinsella in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation. London: Faber & Faber, 1981.

Kinsella, Thomas, Another September. Dublin: Dolmen Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958, 1962.

———. Nightwalker and Other Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.

———. New Poems 1973. Dublin: Dolmen Press; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973.

———. Peppercanister Poems 1972–1978. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1979.

———. Blood and Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.