Confronting Shadows

An Introduction to the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella

David Lynch

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848402874
• eBook ISBN: 9781848402881
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thomas Kinsella's poetry is amongst the most challenging, but also the most rewarding. In this exciting new introduction, David Lynch investigates the themes that underlie Kinsella's work, uncovering motifs of Irish history, political struggle, love, death, war, God and the fractured psyche. Engaging with the connections and rhythms that resonate throughout Kinsella's poetry, and drawing on the work of philosophers and psychologists, Lynch reveals the ways in which Kinsella's work is a response to the ordeal of modern life. Providing a detailed reading of poems from different eras, Confronting Shadows is an entrance for students and other readers into the work of one of the leading Irish poets of the modern era.

1
Entry

Thomas Kinsella’s first book of poetry was published the year the Soviet army entered Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, and when the British state, dealing with the Suez Crisis, finally realised that its role in the world was to become somewhat more modest than it had been accustomed to.1 It was a time that was pre Troubles, pre The Beatles, and (largely) pre TV. The longevity of Kinsella’s literary career is thus breathtaking, and made all the more so when we recognise that he still publishes regularly, pushing his life’s work into the second decade of the twenty-first century. This long literary life may be a crucial contributing factor to the rather odd and contradictory position Kinsella holds within Irish literature.

He is a writer regarded as central and at the same time marginal, his poetry both canonical and existing on the fringe. It is thus understandable that he has been called ‘Ireland’s finest unread poet.’2 As backhanded compliments go, it captures much of the elusiveness of the poet and his influence. His work has been a feature of the Leaving Certificate curriculum for decades, ensuring that recognition of his name remains high. Critics, even those who find his work somewhat obscure, agree on the immensity of Kinsella’s achievement, but even so, he is not a regular on Ireland’s literary circuit, and poetry sections of bookstores will often carry none of his material. Since the early 1970s, when his readership was arguably at its peak, there has been a steady decline in the numbers of those who read his work.

This incongruity of his recognised importance, coupled with his somewhat perplexing marginality, has created an enigmatic impression around the poetry itself. This is an enigma that some readers and critics have found alluring, others annoying. As early as 1990, Eileen Battersby was writing of the ‘mysterious aura which surrounds the poet.’3

The waning of his central influence in Irish poetry has been credited to a number of factors.

His ‘turn’ in style from the structured, ornate early work to poetry of a more modernist, free verse form, dealing with matters of the complicated internal psyche, is often mentioned. The angry and unapologetic anti-imperialist stance of his high-profile ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ poem of 1972, written on the occasion of the Widgery Tribunal, is raised as a reason for his lack of readership in Britain, as well as in a Republic of Ireland that became increasingly politically ‘revisionist’ during the Troubles. That these are contributors to the narrowing of the audience is undoubtedly true. But there are also more subjective factors, such as the nature of publication undertaken by the poet himself. Since the early 1970s, the majority of his work has been published in short, carefully designed chapbooks called the Peppercanister Series. It was a ‘small publishing enterprise, with the purpose of issuing occasional special items from our home in Dublin, across the Grand Canal from St Stephen’s Church, known locally as “The Peppercanister”,’ as the poet has written.4 The series is deliberately produced in short runs, in the hundreds, making each one a special edition. The Peppercanister poems have been occasionally collected into book form. One end result of this style of limited publication, however, has been that the writer, widely regarded as Ireland’s most significant living poet, is quite difficult to read, not because of the complexity of his verse, but because of the unavailability of his published work. Added to this, the poet has become increasingly distant, to the point of almost non-existence in the mainstream world of Irish literary life, giving few interviews, rare poetry readings, and hardly expected to wander onto our TV screens on a late-night chat show. In an age as wholly extroverted as our own, such behaviour goes against the commercial grain, even while it adds to the sense of mystery and authenticity that are core aspects of the poet’s work.

Bono has quipped that he was ‘soaked’ by Kinsella’s poetry in his school days.5 The U2 frontman meant it as a compliment, but the image is a telling one. There are critics for whom Kinsella’s work does more than soak; some have complained of drowning in incomprehension. One critic in the early 1970s commented that the Irish poet had ‘brooded himself to pieces.’6

The poet’s reputation for difficulty and obscurity has become a ‘fixed idea’ in places, as the poet himself has noted.7 As with many fixed ideas, however, it occludes a more nuanced reality. Kinsella’s work is challenging to be sure, but even the moments of deepest ambiguity, such as in sections of the 1985 collection Songs of the Psyche, are not wilfully obscure. An appreciation and understanding of the general mindset of the poet and the thematic rhythms of the work makes even the most bizarre of internal journeys into the psyche increasingly comprehensible, and worthy of close reading. One academic has described the early resistance followed by the enjoyable engagement that her class in University College Dublin (UCD) felt when reading Kinsella: ‘The initial silently groaning resistance, from the serried ranks – undergraduates’ typical mass first reaction to poetry – gives way with remarkable speed to pleasure.’8 Dr Catriona Clutterbuck sees this change as a product of the ‘response-ability’ that is required of the reader by Kinsella’s poems. She views his type of art as ‘radically reciprocal and transferable,’ and it makes Kinsella the ‘most democratic of major Irish poets today.’ This interpretation of Kinsella as an open and engaging poet, his work democratic and accessible to the reader, stands in stark contrast to much critical response.

Kinsella was awarded the freedom of his home city in 2007, and recent years have seen a wave of new critical engagements with the poet’s work, after decades of relative silence.9 The majority of these works belong to the genre of academic, theoretical monographs, providing incredibly rich and new insights into the work. Most have been written by professional literary critics or poet-critics. They have also tended to provide chronological treatments of the work, focusing in particular on the stylistic turn that took place early in Kinsella’s career.

This emphasis on the ‘turn’ in Kinsella’s work is arguably misplaced. It is somewhat like zeroing in on the moment that Bob Dylan ‘went electric’ as the single most crucial event in that singer-songwriter’s career. It is important, no doubt, but it may be of more interest to the guitarist or musician than the listener. The formal change in Kinsella’s poetry may be of more interest to other poets than it is to readers. The move away from formal verse was signalled in the early 1960s, and certainly by the end of that decade the change was complete. Even in thematic terms, the concerns, topics and interests of the poetry have been relatively consistent since that time. This is not to say that there have not been developments and departures, but if one takes a step back and surveys the complete poetic oeuvre, it is the consistency of theme and the gradual accumulation of insights, rather than rupture, which is the works’ most distinctive aspect.

* * *

This study, although building on previous critical engagements, is not in the genre of specialised literary theory. Neither a literary academic nor a professional poet, my primary position of interaction in this study is not even as a journalist. Rather, it is as a close reader, hoping that this contact with the poetry will provide a helpful introduction to other general readers eager to enter the work, but who are searching for a little guidance.

Kinsella, more than many other poets, has emphasised the collaborative relationship between writer and reader. In section 19 of A Technical Supplement, he describes a happy evening reading a ‘demanding book on your knee,’ underlining sections intently. This active engagement from the reader is the sort of response Kinsella would like from the readers of his own work. In an interview in 1996, the poet was clear regarding the fundamental role a reader plays in the creative aspect of poetry. ‘Poetry is a dual effort. The poet initiates an act of communication, while also recording the data, and readers complete the circuit.’10 But this is no easy collaboration: the poet expects the reader to be up to the task, and the undertaking can be difficult. ‘The poems are demanding,’ Kinsella has said. ‘I am aware of that. And they get more demanding as they succeed each other.’11 But true to his project, he does not attempt to ease this burden of difficulty for the reader. He intentionally sets the bar high, and he expects the reader to put in the work. The poems ‘assume that the act of reading is a dynamic one, the completion of an act of communication, not an inert listening to something sweet or interesting or even informative. They are not meant to increase the supply of significant information, but to embody a construct of significant elements.’12 Kinsella told The Irish Times in 1990 that ‘Poetry should be concerned with communication, not entertainment.’13

Whilst this highly engaged and reflective mode of reading is sometimes described as ‘bridging the gap’ or ‘closing the circuit’, for Kinsella the connection is more creative. This is about more than an understanding between poet and reader – it is about a partnership of sorts. Something new and significant is generated during this reading process, as he writes in section 19 of the 1976 collection, A Technical Supplement:

Except that it is not a closed circuit,

more a mingling of lives, worlds simmering

in the entranced interval: all that you are

and have come to be

– or as much as can be brought to bear –

‘putting on’ the fixed outcome of another’s

encounter with what what he was

and had come to be

impelled him to stop in flux, living,

and hold that encounter out from

the streaming away of lifeblood, timeblood,

a nexus a nexus

wriggling with life not of our kind.14

This is a dynamic encounter between two lives; it is ‘simmering’ with potential and wriggles away alive. The author is not dead here. Certainly not in the way Roland Barthes (1915–1980) read the last rites for the artistic creator by concluding ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’15 The author remains vital in Kinsella’s formulation, for he stopped a moment out of flux to render it a work of art. But the author is not the only contributor to this new creation: the active reader produces as well.

It is a seminar, not a lecture; a horizontal rather than vertical relationship; equal rather than imperial. As we will see, the most important intellectual influence on Kinsella’s poetry has been the work of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Interestingly, Jung’s theory on the role of the analyst during therapy has some striking similarities to Kinsella’s view on the relationship between reader and poet. While Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and others had emphasised the role of the therapist as a listener, silently noting the words of the patient, Jung promoted interaction between the two sides, with the therapist actively engaged. For Jung, it is ‘a commitment on the part of the analyst that is at least as great as that of the patient. At the unconscious level, both doctor and patient are participating in what the alchemists termed a coniunctio: like two chemical substances, they are drawn together in the analytic situation by affinity, and their interaction produces change.’16 Like the analyst, the reader of Kinsella’s poetry is urged to not be quiet, but to speak up and engage.

In section 19 of A Technical Supplement, the poet writes warmly of the joys of a nice meal on the patio, picnic on the beach, and reading a page-turner whilst by a tree in the park. But the joy of these pursuits pales against what really matters: ‘for real pleasure there is nothing to equal/sitting down to a serious read.’17

Kinsella’s work is a serious read. Humour is not entirely absent, but it is rare. The matters with which it is engaged are generally on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Also by David Lynch:
• Dedication
• 1 Entry
• 2 Working-Class Heroes
• 3 Walking Alone
• 4 The Dreams that Died
• 5 The Truth Within?
• 6 Resistance
• Works by Thomas Kinsella
• Selected Bibliography
• Suggested Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Praise