Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

The Whole Matter: The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella by Thomas H. Jackson; Readingthe Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella by Brian John; Thomas KinsellaReview by: Dermot McCarthyThe Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jul. - Dec., 1999), pp. 541-544Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515297 .

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Book Reviews 541

In Ciaran Carson's Opera Et Cetera letters are not missives, but the formations

of the alphabet; language referents and catch phrases are not American, but Latin; and the media of choice not old films, but radio operators' code. The volume is as

schematic as any of Carson's earlier efforts, with five sections, each of which is

autonomous, but which are inextricably linked to the others. "Eesti," another of

Carson's by now familiar urban discovery journeys, fuses adult perceptions in

Taillinn (capital of the title land) triggered by the sound of chimes from a local

carillon, which are somehow received on the same frequency as those of the bells

calling worshippers to the early mass the poet remembers attending as a child with

his father at home in Belfast. The grown man, in Estonia, recalls echoing advice

from father to son which closes his poem ? "Eist" or "listen" in Irish.

Carson has been listening. This is a remarkably aural collection. Its second

section literally buzzes. Sublinguistic sounds and signals punctuate the poems ?

a stylus ticks, the truth is revealed sotto voce. There's lip-synch and karaoke, and it strikes a grander note in the next section which begins with a poem entitled

"Auditque Locatus Apollo." Alibi, comprised of nine poems, begins with "a ghostly music from those

conches" ("The Words") and Opera opens with desert troopers who "honked our

rubber bulb horns," and continues laden with radio and recorded signals etched into our collective aural memory. Opera also expands to include much that is menacing either in war or in peace from recent history

? ghosts from the North Africa

campaign, Victoria's visit to India, an updated Montague and Capulet tribal feud, the Surete, even Inspector Morse and Dr. Watson.

Carson, like Paul Muldoon, is basing his poetic reputation more and more on the execution of linguistic acrobatics, the more eclectic the contexts the stronger their fascination. Opera Et Cetera seems to be the first book that he has given over

entirely to that aim, although the verbal high wire act continues. There is danger inherent in such an artistic undertaking, especially if the poet isn't using content as a net.

Christina Hunt Mahony Catholic University of America

Jackson, Thomas H. The Whole Matter: The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1995.184p. $34.95/$17.95 US.

John, Brian. Reading the Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1996.275p. $44.95 US.

It can no longer be said that Thomas Kinsella is not receiving due critical attention. Some might consider three books in two years critical overkill.1 But

Kinsella's poetry warrants the attention and, as both these books make clear, it is

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542 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

now possible to anatomize his career in terms of the thematic and formal develop ments which reveal him to be, perhaps, the most important Irish poet since Yeats.

Both Jackson and John judge him so and for some of the same reasons ? for

example, his "reclamation" of the Gaelic past for contemporary Irish consciousness

and his stylistic and formal "revivification" of contemporary Irish poetry. Both also

agree on the major poems and the nature of their significance, discuss many of the

same images and image patterns, and emphasize the "holistic" nature of both their

subject ? Kinsella's life and career, and Irish society, history and poetry since the

1950s ? and their approach ?

reading the poetry in relation to the private life and

the public world of history and current events. Kinsella's poetry not only records

his quest for self-understanding, it is the questing activity itself. Jackson describes

the processes of Kinsella's consciousness and poiesis as "isomorphic," and John,

too, shows Kinsella using the process of writing heuristically to probe, analyze and

disclose the interrelations of dark and light in self and world.

For John, there are "no sharp about-turns" in Kinsella's development (11). But

for Jackson, Kinsella's abandonment of his early style after Nightwalker (1968) is

"one of the most remarkable moves" in the history of twentieth-century poetry, a

fifteen-year pursuit of "the depth he came to realize his art demanded" (xii); for

Jackson, the culmination of this career-quest occurs with "the astonishing and

compendious Peppercanister Poems 1972-1978" (1979), in which Kinsella articu

lates his hard-won vision of wholeness and doubleness in an appropriately expres sive voice and form (the closest analogues being The Divine Comedy, The Waste

Land and the Cantos). John, however, considers the early Peppercanisters to be

only the beginning of Kinsella's "most substantial phase" and argues that it is not until One (1979), Blood and Family (1988), and From Centre City (1994) that he enters the ranks of Yeats and Joyce (163). White both defend and affirm Kinsella

against critics like Longley and Bedient who prefer the earlier work or fail to

appreciate the significance of the later, differences in approach and emphasis are

evident in their explanations of Kinsella's controversial abandonment of conven

tional poetic form and technique during the mid-1960s. Both acknowledge the influence of Joyce and of Kinsella's growing interest in Jungian depth psychology,

but John sees a correlation between Kinsella's turn toward free form and the serial

poem and "the increasingly liberal attitudes prevalent in Irish society" at the time

(9), while Jackson attributes the new poetic in large part to the "liberating" effect of Pound and Williams upon Kinsella following his move to the US in 1965 (xii).2 Jackson concedes Kinsella's American experience a much greater influence on his

development than John, who repeatedly emphasizes Kinsella's independence and self-determination over the course of his career.

That career begins in the Ireland of the 1950s, but where Jackson emphasizes "the terrible ungroundedness" (3) Kinsella says he felt when he first began to write, John sees "the absence of a satisfactory exemplar or poetic guide" (4) as debilitating the early work. Consequently, Jackson's approach moves more quickly inward to

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Book Reviews 543

read the poems and the career centripetally as Kinsella's personal quest for

wholeness, while John focuses on his struggle with the "double shadow" of Yeats

and Auden. Indeed, if John does not give more attention to issues of literary influence, social context, and critical reception than Jackson, he does provide more

detailed discussion; his book is longer and more traditionally "scholarly." While

they agree on the major poems and give equal attention to them, John discusses

altogether more poems and quotes much more criticism; he also gives more editorial

information and textual comparison and usually provides greater background and more biographical detail. This is not to suggest that Jackson's study is superficial or remiss, far from it; his thesis is clear and distinctive ? Kinsella's career is a

quest for Jungian individuation ? and his emphases develop it in a convincing manner; moreover, his prose is as pleasurable as it is serviceable, which is not

always true of John's.

John is just more thorough; he gives three chapters to the pre-Nightwalker volumes and discusses more of the later collections. Jackson is briefer on the early work, understandably, because in his view Kinsella does not become a poet of major

significance until that "turning-point" volume; John's more extensive discussion makes sense because of his/?en'f-Bloomian view of the early Kinsella voice-wres

tling with Yeats and Auden. Both agree that Kinsella dealt with these inhibiting predecessors by displacing them with others ?

namely Joyce and the poets of the

Gaelic tradition that he assimilated by translating. Jackson is brilliant on Kinsella's

translating as a form of symbiotic poiesis co-extensive with his other self-authored

work and his differentiation between Kinsella's understanding of Joyce's useful ness to his poetry and Kavanagh's, Montague's and Heaney's view of Joyce is

provocatively insightful. John perceives more signs of the later Kinsella in the early work, not only in the themes but in Kinsella's "persistent self-examination" (34). Both acknowledge the importance of "Baggot Street Deserta," but their different evaluations of Downstream (1962) represent a major divergence between them. Jackson describes the early Kinsella as a "stoic virtuoso" who imposes aesthetic order on life experience. This is a modernist Kinsella who quickly "calls into

question one of the major principles of modernist literature, the assumption that the mind can capture in language any such thing as the deep Forms of history or

reality";3 Jackson even perceives a proto-postmodernist Kinsella struggling to

express a mind that "can only register and react, searching not for any Real beyond what is seen, but essentially for an ethical stance toward what seems to be" (19). Similarly, John describes Kinsella as coming to commit himself to "a theory of

process and of knowledge as 'becoming'" (77).

Nightwalker (1968) introduced a new "analytic mode of thought" as well as "a new poetics" (Jackson 38) in Kinsella's work and both Jackson and John note a

change in poetic stance from "isolated observer to... troubled participant" (Jackson 37, cf. John 75). Both see this new stance reflected in a poiesis that discovers

contingent order through the process of composition rather than imposing it through

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544 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

artistic fiat. John describes Kinsella encountering "a world driven by appetite and

pursuing perpetual transformation" (188); marshaling against its indifference the

"positives" of "love, understanding, imagination, or the creative self; and learning that "the basis of psychic growth" is recognition of "the interrelatedness of

opposites" (189). Kinsella's descent into self and history was aided by his reading of Jung, of course. But if Jackson reads Kinsella in a more psychoanalytically

rigorous Jungian manner ? especially Notes from the Land of the Dead (1972),

John might say more narrowly so. Both thoroughly discuss the depth, richness and

complexity of the Jungian psychoanalytic and Celtic mythological humus that

nourishes Kinsella's later poetry, but in John's reading of Kinsella's creativity,

Jung, Yeats, Auden, Joyce, O'Rathaille, the myths of the Triple Goddess and Great

Mother, whoever and whatever, are always more instrumental than essential;

Kinsella is always in control of his research and ultimately, it is Kinsella's own

myth that achieves expressive form. It is his "Irish roots" which are the primordial

ground which Kinsella reads through (and John reads in) his poetry. The Messenger (1978) represents the "definitive manifestation of [Kinsella's]

individuated poetic self for Jackson (142) and he concludes his study with Blood

and Family (1988); in his view the subsequent poems only refine the "model of

mind at work" (148) that achieves completion in the poems of the mid-1980s. John

also judges Blood and Family Kinsella's "most successful collection" (191) but

continues his discussion to From Centre City (1994). Both, ultimately, have

fathomed the same depths in this poet: John praises the poet's courageous confron

tation with "the maiming that leads to understanding" (223) and appreciates the

triumphant vision Kinsella has won from the process; Jackson affirms that "the transformation of contradiction into dialectic" is Kinsella's abiding concern (142).

The poet, who co-operated with both critics, has been wonderfully well-served.

Dermot McCarthy Huron College

NOTES

1. Donatella Badin's Thomas Kinsella appeared in Twayne's English Authors

Series in 1996.

2. When Kinsella left Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1970 to join the English Department at Temple University, he taught a seminar on Pound's

Cantos; see Badin, 8.

3. For a recent discussion of Kinsella as an "uneasy" modernist, see Steven

Matthews, Irish Poetry: politics, history, negotiation; the evolving debate, 1969 to

the present (New York: St. Martin's P, 1997), 74-103.

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