Writers honour Thomas Kinsella
As the last of the jubilant fans streamed past on their way back from Croke Park, trailing thankful cheers and shades of blue, the poets and the lovers of poetry gathered on the steps of the Gate Theatre, preparing to pay homage to their own commanding Dub. Dawning even as it did, to lift the poet's words, "with scent of must and rain" - and with many other scents besides - it was a glorious evening on Parnell Square.
When Thomas Kinsella, with his wife Eleanor and family, slipped quietly into the auditorium in the moments before the celebration in his honour began, one sharp-eyed audience member sounded the first crack of applause, and as it spread, and as it bloomed, into a long ovation of welcome, the man of the hour paused in his path and turned, giving the slightest, most dignified bow.
For a writer who has lived in the US since 1965, but who has always kept Dublin close to the core of his masterful, complex poetry, it seemed a moment of poignant homecoming.
Always in the tribute to a lifetime's brilliant work there is a note of melancholy; a lifetime has its limits, and a tribute, as Kinsella himself acknowledged with characteristic directness at the end of the night, usually falls closer to one limit of that lifetime than to the other. But as the writers assembled for the occasion came on stage, and as his words, in their voices, began to thicken the air of the theatre, it became clear that the evening was one of celebration; not just of a lifetime devoted to poetry, but of the fierce intelligence and the importance of that poetry; of its intensity, of its originality, of its sharpness and even of its strangeness. It was an evening which truly brought home the reasons the poetry of Thomas Kinsella is held, internationally, in such serious esteem; the sheer integrity - artistic, philosophical and cultural - of that poetry, its relentless probing, its inimitable clarity, its unswerving eye.
After opening words from Jack Gilligan, director of the Dublin Writers Festival, and from Joseph Woods, director of Poetry Ireland, proceedings proper were kicked off by Colm Tóibín's reading of perhaps the most familiar of all Kinsella poems, Another September, that haunted realm of "dreams fled away" and "windfall-sweetened soil" whose rhythm pounds still in the memory of generations of Leaving Cert students. Tóibíprefaced his reading by recalling his childhood fascination for the Wexford house in which the poem is set, the house in which Eleanor Kinsella was born and out of which she married.
Another domestic interior, and another troubled consciousness, was the subject of Eavan Boland's chosen poem, the perfectly-pitched The Laundress, from 1962. Other poems brought listeners back to the time of Kinsella's childhood in Inchicore - Dick King, read by Gerard Smyth - to seemingly infinitesimal, yet extraordinary, moments in the relationship between human thought and unheeding nature - John F Deane's reading of Hen Woman, Harry Clifton with Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October, Gerald Dawe with Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore, Derval Tubridy with Native Wisdom, Maurice Harmon with A Selected Life. There was savage anger: Michael Schmidt with excerpts from Butcher's Dozen, the inaugural Peppercanister pamphlet, published in the wake of Bloody Sunday. There was savage irony: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's glinting recital of Brothers in the Craft, an ode to the tense rivalry of the Dublin literary scene. There was sadness: Dennis O'Driscoll reading In Memory, with its account of an old friend's funeral, "everybody everywhere with white hair". And there was tenderness: Catriona Clutterbuck, with her words on Kinsella as a poet of marriage, and her memorable reading of The Familiar, a window on to the simple yet intricate gestures of married love.
And after all this, with the launch of two new volumes of poetry by Kinsella, Man of War and Belief and Unbelief, numbers 26 and 27 in his Peppercanister series . . . after all this, there was more. And perhaps that should teach those of us who allowed that note of melancholy or poignancy to hover in the air of the occasion. Because when it comes to Kinsella, who stood on stage with his fellow poet John F Deane, to face another ovation, this time one which brought the audience to its feet, it seems to be always the case that, after all this, there comes more. And long may it be so.
Belinda McKeon
