"I fold my towel with what grace I can,/Not young and not renewable, but man" ...
"Open this and you will see/A waste, a nearly naked tree" ... "I wonder whether one expects/ Flowing tie or expert sex,/Or even absent-mindedness/Of poets any longer"... "My quarter inch of cigarette goes flaring down toe Baggot Street".
In the 1960s these and many other lines by Thomas Kinsella stuck in this reader's mind. Over the years the resonances have changed (you would need to be a social historian to explain now the significance of that quarter-inch cigarette-end), but what ghosted them into the memory in the first place and kept them there was Kinsella's musicality and the power of his visual imagination, and these have not changed.
Although he writes a great deal about music, Kinsella's references to visual art are few; apart from Cruikshank and Malton, the only painter he mentions is Fuseli, that master of the nightmare. Yet ifs there is one thing that comes through the reading of these poems as a whole, it is the intensity of his commitment to pictura ut poesis and the visionary quality of his images. (Kinsella is crying out for an illustrator of genius, like Paula Rego.)
Some of the images are very strange, their origins in the iconography of myth, if they have any, unfamiliar; this, for instance, is not in Goya but it could be: "a bald/ Muscular head" in whose "tongue/Chains are fastened" and "Firmly held by these, his swayed captives/Yield their wrists against a line of hills".
Myth making, so often in the art of this century a subterfuge of exhausted romanticism, has proved in Kinsella's hands a creative tool.
But Kinsella a visionary? This is odd. In the early years one inclined to think of him as a poet of the mundane, a civil servant of the art of disappointment, advancing out of de Valera isolation into the real world like a T.K. Whitaker of the Irish imagination. Now, however, the collected poems force one to see Kinsella in an entirely different light: less new establishment Whitaker than old loner Raymond Crotty; not a Philip Larkin but a David Gascoyne, another night walker, and Irish.
The Irishness is important. There isn't space here to speculate on the implications of Kinsella's withdrawal from the world of English letters via the Peppercanister Press, but it is true to say that while his work has become universalist into it has also become increasingly local. Yet this reader finds himself wincing when Kinsella uses the word "we", especially in the Bloody Sunday poem, "Butcher's Dozen", with its almost racist condescension to unionists: "They, even they, with other nations/Have a place, if we can find it." One might say, indeed, that the 1992 reissue of this poem, with a note added referring to the "mediocrity" of northern Protestants and the "privileges" enjoyed by their southern brethren, is an exemplary expression of nationalist incomprehension of otherness on this island.
This public wilfulness casts a light on the way Kinsella conducts his private battles with and for poetry. He is a very male poet, conscious of his absurdity ("I lift my baton and my trousers fall") and of fearful sexual mysteries: "Who goes in full into/the moon's interesting conditions?/Who fingers the sun's sink hole:/(I went forward, reaching out)". A suppliant of "the stale abyss", terrifyingly aware of the indifference of his archetypal Hen Woman to her broken eggs ("it's all the one,/there's plenty more where that came from"), he sometimes gives up and sinks into "Deep misery: it is a pleasure./ Soil the self, lie still".
As with sex, so too with history: "I do not like this place./I do not think the people who lived here/were ever happy. It feels evil./Terrible things happened./I feel afraid here when I am on my own". Not least of the "terrible things" is his self: "I could pull down a clean knife shaft/two handed into the brain and worry it/minutely about until there is/gize and numbness in that area".
This book is the product of titanic mental labours, the depth and width of which can only be hinted at here. The result of it in the great later poems, "Song of the Psyche" in particular, is that peculiarly Irish thing, a victory in defeat, but of a furious intensity that "we" have not had before.
In these poems his intellect still dogs itself, yet he accepts with a happiness both weary and surprised that "I never want to be anywhere else"; the Mahlerian forces become sparse and Webernian and the language lightens, lifts and sails off: "God is good but/He had to start/somewhere out of the ache/of I am/and lean Himself/over the mothering pit/in faith/thinking//a mouth/to My kiss/in opening//let there be/remote." There are pages of poetry around this point in the book of surpassing beauty. Thomas Kinsella is an immense poet; with this book we, whoever we are, can start to appreciate properly the magnitude of his achievement.