Poet Thomas Kinsella will be made a Freeman of Dublin today. This week he also went back to his city roots, writes Gerry Smyth
As well as receiving, along with artist Louis le Brocquy, the freedom of the city in City Hall this evening, poet Thomas Kinsella was also honoured in a ceremony that was less formal, but of particular personal significance as it took place in a local setting that brought him back to his Dublin roots.
Last Sunday, Dublin's Lord Mayor, Vincent Jackson, unveiled a plaque to the poet at 37 Phoenix Street, in The Ranch, the curiously named part of Inchicore where Kinsella spent the first 10 years of his life in the 1930s. The Lord Mayor spoke of local pride in the fact that a writer of such eminence, whose work has been acclaimed at home and internationally, had experienced his formative years in the community there and was now back to witness the first public display of this permanent reminder of the poet's link to the locality. The occasion was indeed a special one, attended mostly by residents of the small red-brick street and its surrounding area.
Kinsella spoke with great affection of his memory of growing up in Phoenix Street and of how it was, for him, a place of "first things" - first things that would later surface in his poetry. He recalled those childhood years and named some of the neighbours who lived alongside the Kinsellas. He remembered it as a place of shelter and seclusion - and indeed it remains so today, tucked away from the nearby urban bustle and busy motorways.
In his book of Dublin poems, A Dublin Documentary, published last year, Kinsella writes about the Ranch as: "A curious settlement of four short streets sealed off by two others, one at either end. A pleasant place, at that time still in the country: the narrow road at the corner, lined with blackberry bushes starting towards Chapelizod. Where Tristan, we were told, came for Isolde."
Although the Kinsellas lived in Number 37, where the plaque has been erected next to the front door, Kinsella's poem is about Number 38, and is a beautiful and lucid commemoration of one of those "first things" when his mother lifted him up to look over the boundary wall into the neighbour's yard and he came face to face with the "baby on the other side". Speaking about those days in the 1930s, the poet recollected some of those living in adjoining houses, including Mr Cummins of Number 38, the first World War survivor who features in the poem as the man who was "always hunched down/ sad and still beside the stove,/ with his face turned away towards the bars".
After the unveiling, the gathering moved on to the local community centre where Fair City actor and resident of nearby Sarsfield Road, Tom Hopkins, read 38 Phoenix Street and another Kinsella poem, The High Road. Mary Farrell, a secondary school teacher from Loch Conn Drive in Ballyfermot, read Model School, Inchicore, which is still there with 200 pupils filling its classrooms. In Kinsella's time, learning through Irish, it was where "The taste/ of ink off/ the nib shrank your/ mouth". Then came the turn of Seamus Fitzpatrick, a retired local authority official and prominent trade unionist from James Street/Mount Brown, to read the poem Dick King, the elegy for that upright man who came "To bring a dying language east/ And dwell in Basin Lane".
That same Dick King, a frequent visitor to the Phoenix Street household, left a lasting impression on the young boy who would later champion that dying language with his translations from Old Irish, and who now stands commemorated, in the words of the plaque, as the "poet and Freeman of the City of Dublin who lived in this house", at 37 Phoenix Street.
