While it is generally accepted by serious readers of poetry, both here and abroad, that Thomas Kinsella is the major Irish poet of his generation and a poet of very high standing internationally, nonetheless there are many here in Ireland who think that from the early 1970s, something went badly wrong for Kinsella as a poet. The beautifully crafted, very accessible work of the early Kinsella is perceived to give way to densely turgid work, uncompromisingly, even defiantly private, which lost him many of his early readers.
Personally, I have never subscribed to this view, rather seeing in Kinsella's work a continuous evolution from the early Auden-esque lyrics to the later work influenced by Pound and William Carlos Williams. Kinsella's work is nothing if not of a piece, held together by a powerful moral strength of vision.
Derval Tubridy's Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems meticulously, if often laboriously charts this evolution by focusing on the work issued by the poet's private press, the Peppercanister Press, beginning with the publication of Butcher's Dozen in 1972. The critical response to that pamphlet at the time was mainly hostile. Although Kinsella deliberately wrote his satire in a kind of doggerel tetrameter to get it to as wide a readership as possible, many reviewers, especially those from the North (James Simmons perhaps most notably), resented a nationalist Southern "interfering" in a Northern "situation". Some even went so far as to allege that Kinsella was deliberately commercialising his work.
Now, whatever one may think of Butcher's Dozen, to level the charge of commercialism at Kinsella can only be the result of ignorance. The fact of the matter is that Kinsella's nationalism, as much as Austin Clarke's social concerns in the 1950s and 1960s, was (is?) out of keeping with the prevailing Establishment atmosphere of historical revisionism and, in the South, fearful anxiety about the Northern "situation". Any shade of green at that time was unwelcome. Kinsella's reputation, in Ireland at least, despite the lip-service given it, began then its gradual decline. Whether or not this decline bothers Kinsella I don't know, but I suspect it doesn't. Certainly there is often anger in his occasional critical utterances and in his later poetry. But that anger, it seems to me, issues not from personal vanity but from a deeply rooted commitment to a complex and morally informed view of Irish society and culture.
If Kinsella's later work is difficult - and it often is - it is because it is non-repetitive and profoundly searching. It is a poetry that comes to us from the edge of the abyss where individual love and life find themselves precariously balanced, and where only moral and artistic courage prevent that terrible fall into passivity and nihilism.
Ms Tubridy's book is a solid piece of academic research which will doubtless be of enormous value to students of Kinsella's work. I wish, however, she had made more of the Pound and Williams influence, and I also wish she had been daring enough to look more deeply into the sometimes sly ambivalence with which the work of this very great Irish poet is often received here in Ireland. But perhaps that's work for another day and for another scholar.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher. His version of Lorca's Tamarit Poems will be published by Dedalus Press early next year