At first glance these two major figures in Irish writing could hardly be more different: Cronin the brilliant court-jester in prose, commentator on Myles na Gopaleen and Beckett; and Kinsella the sombre and intense poetic keeper of the Gaelic/English "dual tradition", from the Tain to O Riada. Cronin the acerbic critic and novelist has made relatively few sorties into the poetic field (though some of them highly significant ones), while Kinsella has been a constant major presence in Irish poetry for 40 years: for the last 27 years, indeed, a kind of self-appointed conscience of the whole poetic tradition. Cronin is a beguilingly approachable writer; Kinsella is rarely an easy read, nor does he set out to be.
Yet there are important points of contact between these two exact contemporaries, born in 1928. Both are the inheritors of the first wave of modernism: the first generation after Yeats which belonged in literary Ireland to the liberalising scepticism of The Bell, which complicated notions of Irishness, as of everything else.
Their various brands of modernism may come to be counted amongst the heralds of the new European Ireland. Not that Cronin always pushes modern complexity in your face: his transparency has to be taken very cautiously, especially in the poetry. Engaging as many of the shorter poems in the 1982 Selected are, the greater ambition of his poetry remains most evident in the 1967 R.M.S.Titanic, which essayed a very broad overview of the modern world and its travails. The same modernist meeting of the everyday with matters of great philosophical scope is much in evidence in the new book. For example, "Boys Playing Football" at first reading seems a dismayingly straightforward attack on the complacency of "liberals " (the American "L word"). The liberal parent is glad to see that his children's football has not been stitched by child-labour in Pakistan:
Complacent as ever,
He will smile on his own children.
It is the way of liberals.
It is the way of the world.
But uncertainty about this over-orthodox view is confirmed by the marvellous last poem "Meditation on a Clare Cliff-top" (a bow maybe to the last poem in Heaney's The Spirit Level?) which takes an altogether grander and more unsettling perspective on "the way of the world", sketching a cosmology from the Greeks to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and on to the absurd aloneness of the modern existentialist condition, no less.
But this bleak conclusion ends a collection of much more Croninesque spirit and variety: devoted sons "in league with mother against some poor slob of a father" (though he, too, is contextualised by Proust and Joyce); a lyrical recalling of "1798"; and a kind of wild old wicked man in the title-poem that follows another Irish tradition running from Merriman to Durcan. It is slippery stuff.
Meanwhile Kinsella continues to build the edifice of peppercanisters begun in 1972 under his own imprint and continued by Dedalus since 1990. These classically modernist fragmentary sequences are Kinsella at his most cryptic; yet the reader keeps trust that they will amount in the end to an important personal cultural Odyssey through late 20th-century Ireland.
This latest pair work on the same lines as their predecessors, though they are at the personal rather than public end of Kinsella's wide sliding-scale. The poems revisit the established themes: Dublin localities (especially Baggot Street), sexuality, the fragility of the ordinary, and bells ringing through all of it. The cumulative impact of these sequences will be more evident on the appearance of the forthcoming Collected Poems: an event in Irish poetry of the first importance.
Bernard O'Donoghue teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford. His last poetry collection, Here nor There, was published earlier this year by Chatto and Windus