{"id":29278,"date":"2010-10-29T08:22:52","date_gmt":"2010-10-29T12:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=29278"},"modified":"2020-11-16T09:23:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T14:23:34","slug":"the-penguin-book-of-contemporary-irish-poetry-thomas-kinsella","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=29278","title":{"rendered":"The Books: The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry<\/i>: Thomas Kinsella"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

Next book on the shelf is The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon. I am leaving Six Centuries of Great Poetry<\/i> behind. If you’d like to see all the posts done on poets in that book, you can click here<\/a>. The “tags” function is one of the best parts of WordPress.<\/p>\n

\nMy father gave me this book in March of 2008. I treasure it.<\/p>\n

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The Dolmen Press, operated out of Dublin, was founded in 1951 by Liam Miller, and played a crucial part in the development of Irish poetry in the mid-20th century. It was a strictly nationalist operation; before The Dolmen Press, poets (and other artists) had looked to London, mainly, as the center of the publishing world, and that was where there was the hope for their work being seen. That changed with Dolmen. Many of the great Irish poets of the mid to late 20th century were published first in Dolmen. Questions of nationalism and ancestry are, of course, potentially explosive affairs in Ireland, and having to depend on England – England! – to confer validity to their work as artists was a situation that could not stand. Irish poet Thomas Kinsella, born in 1928, was a huge part of the development of the Dolmen Press, one of its main voices, and he, in many ways, set the tone. The Penguin compilation starts with Thomas Kinsella, and though he may be a bit early to count as “contemporary”, the editors thought it was important to lump him in with the later group, the poets of the 60s, 70s and beyond, because his work was so influential, so gigantic. <\/p>\n

Yeats is the Irish god of letters. He was the one who tried to teach by example, showing younger Irish poets, “Here is the way we should be going.” He spoke of the Celtic history, the myths and legends, trying to bring them into the current-day, as a way of retrieving that lost history. Kinsella, although his verse doesn’t read like Yeats, is strictly in that tradition. He did a lot of translating from the original Irish, and the Dolmen Press published his translation of T\u00e1in B\u00f3 C\u00faailnge<\/i>, an epic poem based on a legendary tale in Irish history, with surviving manuscripts of said epic dating from the 12th century. It’s part of the famed Ulster Cycle, and describes a pre-Christian time in Irish history, when the Irish had their own gods and myths and legends. The eradication of the Irish language by the British was so complete that much of this work was totally lost to future generations. As Sin\u00e9ad O’Connor said in her song Famine<\/i>:<\/p>\n

And then on the middle of all this
\nThey gave us money not to teach our children Irish
\nAnd so we lost our history
\nAnd this is what I think is still hurting me <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It hurt Kinsella as well. He was angry, very angry, and while he did not seclude himself in Ireland (he also lived in the United States for many years, teaching at Temple University), most of his poems come from that vast grief of what has been lost, the severing of the connection with the past. It’s a tricky balance Kinsella has: he looks to the past, but the past flows forward into the present and the future. He is not ONLY about the past. His work can be difficult, although I find some of his poems amazingly accessible. His publication of T\u00e1in B\u00f3 C\u00faailnge<\/i> was a high watermark in Irish literary history, and that was in 1969, a terrible year for Ireland. The past informing the present. The glorious Irish past something to cling to in the awful days of the late 60s. This can be a tiresome stance (and I say that as a person of Irish descent), a way to avoid<\/i> current-day problems. Look at what happens in the madrassahs across the world, a culture wanting to go back to the 12th century, because they are not equipped to handle modern life. Kinsella is not one of those. Kinsella was a Dublin boy, born and raised, his sensibility is urban, which also impacts his work and his outlook.<\/p>\n

Austin Clarke, another Irish poet with a reputation for being difficult, just before Kinsella’s time, was Kinsella’s guiding star. (See my post on him here.<\/a>) As was Ezra Pound. Kinsella’s later poems, long narrative continuing stories, similar to the Cantos<\/i>, owe much to Pound. <\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i> writes about Kinsella:<\/p>\n

His translations from the Irish tradition are celebrated as our chief access to an enormous, and for many years suppressed, resource. Ireland for him implies Swift and Goldsmith, Mangan, Davis and Fergusson, and preeminently Yeats… Kinsella swims naturally against tides of fashion. He does not go in fear of abstractions, he gives them body and valency. He is also alive to place, to character and voice, to direct and oblique narrative. Like early Auden, but in quite a different world, and like Yeats in an equally separate realm, he is alive to politics. It is not strange that he is less read than John Montague, perhaps than Richard Murphy and others of his contemporaries; he makes large demands of himself and consequently of his reader, in ways similar to Austin Clarke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seamus Heaney has written extensively on Thomas Kinsella and one of his essays is included in the prose complication Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. Heaney writes:<\/p>\n

Since the late 1960s, this deeply responsible poet has been absorbed in a slowly purposeful, heroically undeflected work of personal and national inquisition. From his early, formal and syntactically compact poems of the 1950s, when he defined his purpose as the quest for honesty in love and art, to his more recent open-weave, semi-expressionist explorations of the roots of consciousness, the muscle tone of Kinsella’s poetry has always been in perfect order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love Heaney’s observations about the poem “Interlude”, published in a collection in 1960 (so, early Kinsella). In “Interlude” comes the following lines:<\/p>\n

Love’s doubts enrich my words; I stroke them out.
\nTo each felicity, once. He must progress
\nWho fabricates a path, though all about
\nDeath, Woman, Spring, repeat their first success.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Heaney writes:<\/p>\n

So does he stroke out the words or does he stroke out the doubts? If he strokes out the doubts and keeps the enriched words, there is no honesty either in the words or in the love. If he strokes out the words, there is no honest acknowledgement that love’s doubts are the corollary of love’s enrichments. It is a bind from which he would not be released because of an imposed discipline of understanding. The voice of that discipline is the true voice of Kinsella’s muse; in the contexts of sexual and domestic love, biological and spiritual survival physical and psychological exhaustions and renewals – all of which Kinsella takes for granted as what he calls simply “the ordeal” – this muse speaks the same command over and over again throughout Kinsella’s poetry. Deeper, she says. Further. Don’t repose in the first resolution of your predicament. That resolution too is a predicament. What more? ‘Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.’ Forge on. Fabricate the path.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that’s how to read a poem.<\/p>\n

Two more quotes before we get to the poem I have chosen today. (In case I haven’t said it recently: These books of poetry I am in now – part of my Daily Book Excerpt project that has been going on for years – are compilations, with poems chosen for inclusion. One of my “rules” for this Daily Excerpt is that I choose a poem actually included in the compilation, since the overriding purpose of this project is the books on the shelves<\/i> and what they contain<\/i> – so if a poem I love by one of these poets is NOT included in said compilation, then I will not use it as the excerpt. I enjoy limitations with a project as vast as this.)<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt again, on Thomas Kinsella:<\/p>\n

Kinsella describes a Dual Tradition<\/i> in Irish literature, attempting to bring back fully into play the Irish linguistic tradition and the poets of Ireland neglected during the centuries of English rule. Austin Clarke is a linchpin in his argument. It is not a nationalist argument but something more fundamental, about recoveries of voice and resource that will speak more deeply to Irish writers than the off-the-peg forms and strategies of international modernism, postmodernism and anti-modernism. The liberating resources are not only Irish. Pound teaches us to discern our own voice through the static of convention, just as Proust helps us to uncover the lineaments of our own biographies as he traces the miasmic ebb and flow of Marcel’s. The task is to recover rather than invent a language, to live rather than exist a life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A crucial difference. Kinsella has to do with giving Irish culture a shot in the arm, of confidence, of memory, of ownership. He looks back, but he looks around him as well. I love his stuff. I love the political stuff, and I love the personal, too. <\/p>\n

And finally, Heaney again:<\/p>\n

[Kinsella] has ingested loss – of a literature in the Irish language, of a political vision in post-independence Ireland, of all that time robs from the original resources of the individual psyche – and has remembered it in an art that has the effect of restitution. The place of waste, the place of renewal and the place of writing have become coterminous within his poetry … Kinsella is, in fact, the representative Irish poet in that his career manifests the oath-bound unrewarded plight of the comitatus<\/i> in Yeats’s black tower. In his work, we can watch the ancient correspondence between the nation’s possibilities and the imaginations of its poet – represented originally by the Milesian bard Amergin – discover itself again in a modern drama of self-knowledge and self-testing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you are interested in poetry, I hope all of these serious political words will not put you off Thomas Kinsella. Just remember it is nearly impossible for an Irish writer to NOT be political. Even being a-political is a political statement. Much of his work is completely personal, there are poems about standing around the death-bed of a father, of looking at portraits of ancestors on a wall, of a hen laying an egg. He has a great eye, and great facility with language and rhythm. <\/p>\n

His observations in the poem below (the fist in the lap, the bottle under the apron) are so human, almost photographic: you can SEE this woman. It’s a great example of the personal being automatically political. The gap between generations writ large. The abyss between memory and knowledge. How to bridge the gap? It seems impossible. And I love the first sentence. A poet, a writer, a man with a voice, stopping it in his throat, in the face of the enormous past.<\/p>\n

\nAncestor<\/big><\/p>\n

I was going to say something,
\nand stopped. Her profile against the curtains
\nwas old, and dark like a hunting bird’s.<\/p>\n

It was the way she perched on the high stool,
\nstaring into herself, with one fist
\ngripping the side of the barrier around her desk
\n— or her head held by something, from inside.
\nAnd not caring for anything around her
\nor anyone there by the shelves.
\nI caught a faint smell, musky and queer.<\/p>\n

I may have made some sound – she stopped rocking
\nand pressed her fist in her lap; then she stood up
\nand shut down the lid of the desk, and turned the key.
\nShe shoved a small bottle under her apron
\nand came toward me, darkening the passageway.<\/p>\n

Ancestor … among sweet- and fruit-boxes.
\nHer black heart …
\nWas that a sigh?
\n— brushing by me in the shadows,
\nwith her heaped aprons, through the red hangings
\nto the scullery, and down to the back room.<\/p>\n

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