In the early 1960s, Thomas Kinsella reigned as Ireland’s foremost poet. His work was sophisticated, its settings frequently urban, local but with a cosmopolitan flavor, and seemed reflective of an Ireland moving into a new and more prosperous era (a move that was partly due to innovative policies in the Department of Finance, the branch of the Irish government in which Kinsella was at the time employed at a senior level), exercised about the past without being driven by its questionable pieties. Much of the poetry appealed to the sensibilities of the isolated individual, as in “Mirror in February” from his 1962 collection, Downstream:

Below my window the awakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities,
And how should flesh not quail that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.

Looking back, it is rather a surprise that the appeal of this kind of writing should have been replaced shortly afterward by Seamus Heaney’s preoccupations with digging in bogs and the esthetic excavation of a rural Ireland that was fast disappearing.

But Kinsella himself, by now an academic in the United States, was also becoming preoccupied with the Irish tradition and the fragmented inheritance that it represented. Like many of his predecessors, he began producing a series of translations from Irish Gaelic, the most famous of which was certainly The Táin, thus making the ancient sagas once more accessible and stimulating to a succession of Irish audiences. At the same time, however, his own poetry was increasingly difficult and obscure, taking a Jungian turn in its concern with obscure imagery and archetypes, and with fragmentation, and thereby losing him his original readership.

Then, suddenly, in the early 1970s, Kinsella reemerged briefly again with a style more naked and immediate than anything that had gone before. The shootings of apparently unarmed civilians in Northern Ireland by members of the British Army in 1972 brought forth “Butcher’s Dozen”: “I went with Anger at my heel / Through Bogside of the bitter zeal / Jesus pity!—on a day / Of cold and drizzle and decay.” The collection itself issued from Kinsella’s own Peppercanister Press, which he had founded in Dublin and from which he was to continue to produce several volumes that were esthetically pleasing but of limited circulation.

Kinsella remains, then, a somewhat enigmatic figure, driven by his own demons and always threatening withdrawal. Controversial in his perception of the Irish tradition and especially in his relationships with other Irish writers, he is nevertheless a major voice of the postwar years who now seems on the point of having his work reassessed and his proper status recognized. The present Collected Poems, which “contains virtually all his own poems written over the past forty years”—but not the translations—is to be welcomed as significantly assisting in that process.