In the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella … the sense of life as deprivation and the oral rage and horror bring up the pathology of narcissism; but unlike [Ted] Hughes, who would be wholly immersed in the instinctive, bodily, and natural, Kinsella surfaces into the human, individual, and moral. Hughes in his poems is hardly even an Englishman, but Kinsella is as much a Dubliner as Yeats was. Despite his own bestial allegories of the harsh Super-ego (a dragon, for instance, hungering "in filth and fire" though laying an "egg-seed" of goodness, or decency), his sphere is the world of men, Irishmen like his father…. (p. 481)

His reality-smiting or-smelting turn for quaint sick fantasy—poetic expressionism—has become more pronounced [in Peppercanister Poems 1972–1978]. But at times he still revisits what he has known or writes of his present world with a stiff manly head-back regard …, and then he compels…. His sensibility is so grim that the real if rationed delights of his ear and sense of form seem a necessary mercy. It is a mercy, however, that at other times he is less inclined to bestow. But the subtle uncongenial art of [Peppercanister Poems] develops like a negative with repeated immersions, and Kinsella is still the Irish poet most worth following. (p. 482)