Pains of Praise

Abstract

Until he reached his sixtieth birthday, Thomas Kinsella has rarely if ever been thought of as a poet with any kind of paradisal vision. The early poems were orderly, even serene in a clean-cut way, but the order and the cutting had a surgi cal implication. That concern with suffering, more precisely suffering as a prelude to and even form of growth, has flowered in the longer, more experimental poems written since his virtual emigration in the late 1960s. Severance from the Dolmen Press increased his apparent isolation, though the establishment of the Peppercanister imprint after 1972 provided an alternative line of communication with his read ers. Now, with Dolmen gone from the Irish publishing scene, these two books show us a renewed confidence in the poet's mode of address to his highly problematic audience. Not that things are suddenly straight-forward. One Fond Embrace was first published by the Deerfield Press and Gal lery Press in 1981; it stood, that is to say, somewhat aside from the Peppercanister series to which it is now admitted in a radically revised and extended version. The Oxford collec tion brings together the preceding five Peppercanisters (nos. 8-12), so that the reader now has a better opportunity to assess Kinsella at length than has been the case for many a year. The covers are instructive; James Malton's view of St Catherine's Church (Dublin) darkens on the white lami nated boards of Blood and Family, the present-day clock missing from this eighteenth-century engraving. On the cover of One Fond Embrace, the reader finds another engraving ? the Last Supper, but with Christ erased. These lacunae ? Time hidden by Malton's perspective, Christ pre maturely vanished from the earth by the art of Dedalus ? are emblematic in a way which one has come to find charac teristic of Kinsella's larger aesthetic strategy. The corpus of his poetry ? and the Latin term seems apt, even with its theological and medical overtones acknowledged ? is manifestly incomplete, while also being deviously doubled, self-quoting, tortuously self-referring, edge-less. One Fond Embrace has gained more than a casual analo gical relation to the Last Supper, the treacherous embrace of disciples, the bitter irony of a sacrament founded on betrayal. Such themes take us no further than Kinsella's obvious, and hard-earned, Joycean allegiance. As prelude to