The Irish University Review must be one of, if not the, longest-running academic-literary journals published in Ireland.
No mean feat given the fundamental changes which have taken place in both the academic and literary marketplace wherein "Irish Studies" sits scrutinising, indeed dominating, all things associated with the cultural past and present of this country.
IUR's current volume (31) is a special issue dedicated to Thomas Kinsella.
Guest edited by Catriona Clutterbuck, this is a valuable critical accounting of Kinsella's poetry; understandably leaving little space for his own criticism, editorial work or translations. Ten essays, an all too brief extract from an interview with Kinsella, along with two of his poems, make for a compact and intense read.
Wisely, the editor has gone for variety in critical approach. Donatella Abbate Badin's stylistic investigations are nicely counterpoised with two fine essays by Maurice Harmon - IUR's founding editor and author of the first critical study on Kinsella published in Ireland - and Peter Denman, one of an increasingly rare breed of meticulous readers in modern poetry.
Alex Davis (on the Pound connection), Jefferson Holdridge (on the aesthetics of home and family) and Ian Flanagan (on the Enlightenment) are matched by a particularly impressive cluster of studies by Lucy Collins (Kinsella and women), Ruth Ling (marriage poems) and Derval Tubridy (Dinnseanchas). These fresh and unencumbered critical views, intent and wide-framed, bring Kinsella's poetic vision firmly into contemporary perspective and discourse.
It is with the opening essay by Dennis O' Driscoll, mischievously titled, and vindicated, 'His Wit: Humour and Satire in Thomas Kinsella's poetry', that the ground rules are laid down for a significantly different order of interpretation, not only of Kinsella's achievement, but of 20th-century Irish poetry.
It is so often read in strict and increasingly constrictive terms of national categories (a one-track relay race from Yeats to Heaney), yet the much more complex truth is present in the backdrop to the following passage from O' Driscoll's wide and witty mood setting to this important gathering of scholarly writing.
Remarking upon "how far (Kinsella's)star has fallen in England from the days when he was looked on as potentially the best Irish poet after Yeats", O' Driscoll continues: "Having been featured in the second of the New Lines anthologies (1963), closely associated with The Movement in England, Kinsella might have become an Irish outrider of that group which included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and John Wain. Although, in the event, he was to defect to the arch-enemy camp of Ezra Pound and modernism, Kinsella's condemnations of contemporary poetry - and his unleashing of merciless and witty broadsides against public and private targets, are in keeping with the spirit - and, as it were, the letters also - of Larkin and Amis."
Now that's a real turning up of the books. O'Driscoll shifts the critical globe and suddenly comparisons flow where before we have had in general literary histories and poetry anthologies only fixed and unexamined positions.
Gerald Dawe's most recent collection of poetry is The Morning Train. He has edited, with Michael Mulreany, The Ogham Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Ireland, just published by the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin