In her recently published study of the Peppercanister series the young Irish scholar Derval Tubridy has identified many of the influences and sources in Thomas Kinsella's unusual and elusive cycle of poems, which he has been publishing under his own imprint since the early 1970s. For those who have not followed the plot, Kinsella's Collected Poems is a good place to start since it contains a section devoted to the Peppercanister poems. Tubridy's lucid book will work a treat for student and general reader alike because it gives a trusty guide to the Kinsella districts, both inner and outer. No sooner had the critical introduction appeared than two further shots into the contemporary dark came along in the shape of Citizen of the World (which could well be subtitled "in praise of Oliver Goldsmith", the presiding spirit) and Littlebody, an impish, spooky and mordant sequence.
Reading both put me in mind of a passage from Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing (IX): "Once there is speech, no need for a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough". Kinsella's Peppercanister poems are all about the tension between "a story for myself" and "life alone". Indeed the poems make precious few concessions to any governing master narrative other than the complex accidental moment of the here and now. What the present might bring or share with the past is, as in Beckett, to be found in the poet's speech. The "subject matter" is "life alone" - good or bad, chance, custom or simply learning the ropes:
Her little fingers were everywhere, hurrying to get at everything ahead of everybody.
Soon she will have learned to conceal her interest - offering everything to everybody but arranging it so that her choice comes around at her turn.
It is a contradictory world too, from the chilliness of "Cul de sac" to the luminous brevity of "Glenmacnass". Kinsella's Peppercanister poems are elliptical and yet there is a solidity to the domestic draw of his imagination. The "society" of Little body, the local streets of the poet's boy hood and young manhood, are set along side an almost cabbalistic shadowland, with its very own animal and spirit kingdom. This is a virtual reality full of surprises such as the perverse animation of the gargoyle-esque Littlebody, or of nightmarish, natural encounters:
Close up, on a patch of bark, a mouse body upside-down. Wings flat.
Meant only to be seen quick in the half-light, little leather angel falling everywhere, snapping at the invisible.
For those who like to know where they are on the poetry shelf, a contemporary case could be made for reading Thomas Kinsella's Peppercanister poems as postmodernist. Sampling and remixing the past of myth, folklore, urban spleen, classical and traditional music, philosophy, autobiography and literary history is, after all, what these poems "do". But I think not. Kinsella's Peppercanister poems are maps of real places and the reader should be prepared to enter them on their own terms. Kinsella refuses the consolation of harmonics, sometimes collapsing "poetic" value altogether into hardened and blunt statement as in "Breakdown" from Little body. More often than not the escutch eoned backgrounds of Citizen of the World have a haunting visual clarity as in the scene setting of "Shop Shut":
I pulled the heavy door over and leaned my head against it, the long key coarse in my face.
I inserted the iron teeth in the box lock and turned the heart of the handle on my den of images. Shop shut.
Summer night, Percy Lane. The last light full of images. Gnats out of nothing.
Maybe when the entire Peppercanister series is brought together in a collection, a kind of Cantos, we will see the full extent of Kinsella's "den of images" so far. It is most certainly a strange, uncommon poetic vision of and for today. No one else writes like Thomas Kinsella.
Gerald Dawe's most recent collection of poetry is The Morning Train. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin
