ACCORDING to Seamus Deane, this book is "the most sustained, careful and sympathetic reading we have of Kinsella's poetry. Brian John has the necessary patience and scruple that Kinsella demands; he also has the gift of bringing to us the rich reward that Kinsella finally yields."
In the groves of academe, shades of meaning move lightly over the ground, shod with circumspection. Outside the forest, however, one might be tempted to suspect that words such as "sustained" and "patience" are really wearing hob- nailed boots. As for Kinsella yielding his reward, doesn't the qualifying "finally" not hint that getting there is a bit of to quote Trevor Joyce, a "sole glum trek"?
The answer to that question is, for my part, no, Kinsella has his faults, but what brings him close to greatness, particularly in the later work, is his emotional urgency, an immediacy which is dramatic, even theatrical, though stage-frightened.
Dr John is, by contrast, a trudger. For instance, when he comes to the word "ground" he gives us every meaning it has in the dictionary (bar the past tense of grind - as in teeth); and when he quotes, as he often does, he often then tells us what the quotation means by quoting again the words quoted. His scholarship, too, is occasionally narrow; it isn't, for instance, Jung who "associates Hecate . . . with crossroads".
And he sometimes seems perverse; for instance, these lines from "Butcher's- Dozen" about unionists are read by John as a plea "for pity and understanding between the communities". I quote: "though there's reason for alarm/In dourness and lack of charm/Their cursed plight calls out for patience./They, even they, with other nations/Have a place, if we can find it./Love our changeling? Guard and mind it./Doomed from birth a cursed heir,/Theirs is the hardest lot to bear,/Yet not impossible, I swear,/If England would but clear the air/And brood at home on her disgrace." Some-plea.
But John knows his Kinsella thoroughly and there is illumination in his assembling and comparison of different versions of major texts. Like all good poets, Kinsella is a ruthless editor of his own work, and John is good at seeing the difference. (But one wonders whether the poet has always been right in his choices; is, for instance, the line "The ripples gathered to the ghostly bank" really better than the earlier "The ripples scattered, dying, to their task"?)
Dr John also plots a steady path through Kinsella's philosophical, historical and musical influences. As a Welshman who works in Canada, he has a perhaps instinctive understanding of the importance of this most Irish of poet's choosing of independence on the margins, of the role of women in the poetry, and an adequate appreciation of the way Kinsella has transcended influences, such as that of Auden, while assimilating and transforming the ghosts of Yeats and Joyce. John rarely fails to get these matters right.
Finally, then, Deane's description is apt. But why read John's book when you can read Kinsella himself? Unless you're in the Eng. Lit. business, almost no why.
