The Pen Shop by Thomas Kinsella Peppercanister Press 8pp, £10/£5.95; Quality Time by Dennis O'Driscoll Anvil Press 77pp, £7.95 in UK
The Pen Shop begins with an ending: Under my sig- nature a final kiss./In fading ink. With added emphasis./That ought to tell her what she can do/with her fierce forecasts:/Rage, affliction and outcry!
We must await the biographer to discover who "she" is. But the situation is puzzling: this woman merits a kiss, admonitory perhaps but also emphatic, and yet when the poet has posted his letter in the GPO he adds a dismissive line: Another cool acquaintance. This is dramatic, even suspenseful, like the opening of a good short story. But why is the ink fading? For an answer we have to follow the poet from the GPO, down O'Connell Street, pausing at Bewley's in Westmoreland Street for coffee, to the Pen Shop in Dame Street where he buys "some of their best black refills". Kinsella has always used the accessories of life to delimit his more otherworldly aspirations; his Pierian spring flows from a fountain pen, his soul is secured with buttons.
The drama of the opening is further defined by public history: the walk refers to the statues of Larkin, Sir John Gray, William Smith O'Brien, Daniel O'Connell, Grattan, Thomas Davis, Burke and Goldsmith - this is not a poem for foreigners.
It is, however, the time-shifts and the private history that are most problematic for the native reader. The poem is contemporary and yet, as if then were now, a Guinness barge passes under O'Connell Bridge: The long body sliding in/under my feet, starting to slow down/for the Lady Patricia moored be- yond Butt Bridge,/falling and lifting against the quay./Family queen,/accept him, fumbling at your flank. This "family queen" also appears in Bewley's where the poet toasts her: touching her glass, once, to mine. But is she the recipient of the opening final kiss . . . Another cool ac- quaintance? I don't think a good fiction editor would accept this; the material is there or hinted at, but there is an amount of unrelated topographical and historical windiness in the middle, the story is neither revealed nor resolved and the reader is left confused.
But then, this is only secondarily a story, and one which is, moreover, a chapter of a work in progress - it's number 19 in the Peppercanister series. How does it work now as poetry? Having read it many times and found myself thinking often about what it says about Kinsella's character - for instance, how closely he links rejection with acceptance, brutality with tenderness, like a wilful boy - I find it, despite the puzzlements, memorable both humanly and poetically. As ever, Kinsella's eye, ear and intellect still work their old dry magic: My left hand distinct against the parapet./The para- pet distinct, with my hand against it./It was over quickly. But something was indicated./ Measured to the need. While not forgetting the capacity.
As a critic Dennis O'Driscoll has been an admirable champion of European poetry, particularly the great Miroslav Holub. This book contains a version of a poem by Max Dizdar and an excellent piece by the recent Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska. One also finds traces of Martianism, Muldoonism and Larkinism. Less easily detected is the personality of O'Driscoll himself. This is not made any easier by a certain insipidity of thought, particularly at the ends of poems, and a rather more than occasional slackness of language - eyes are "flyblown" (tainted with larvae?), a plane is like a train, flowers "baste" grass, etc.
The mild suburban ironies and bureaucratic despairs occasionally give ay to assertion, as for example in this piece called Home: when all is said and done/what counts is having someone/you can phone at five to ask/for the immersion heater/to be switched to `bath'/ and the pizza taken from the deepfreeze.
Brian Lynch's Playtime, in collaboration with the painter Gene Lambert, was published recently