Red, the South Seas island in “Red.” At the heart of this, of course, is Holden’s argument for the feminization of the East in Maugham: “the East is gendered female, the West male” (17). Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation is a well-argued, careful, and provocative book, valuable not only to Maugham scholars but also to any one interested in the literature of the colonizers. At the end of his study, however, Holden reminds us that, beyond all analysis, there is still a pleasure in reading Maugham, a pleasure, one might add, that was always there, even when earlier scholars excluded him from the canon on aesthetic grounds. In his introduction, Holden describes — a touch plaintively — three south-east Asian readers who ought not to have enjoyed, but nonetheless did, reading Maugham’s Asian fiction. The dogs bark, in whatever critical voice, but the caravan moves on. Ro b e r t l . c a l d e r / University of Saskatchewan Brian John, Reading the Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (Wash ington: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). xii, 275. $44.95 (U.S.) cloth, $27.95 (U.S.) paper. As the Yeats and Joyce industries continue to flourish and perennial brochures invite North Americans to Ireland for Yeats, Joyce, and Synge summer schools, one awaits the day when living Irish writers will get the recogni tion that several of them have deserved for years. Of these, Thomas Kinsella is one of the best poets writing in English, though not the most immediately accessible. Brian John’s Reading the Ground is a lucid, fair, precise, and scrupulously honest study. It is also erudite, sensitive, and modestly elegant. Focussing on patient explication and appreciation of Kinsella’s poetry from Poems (1956) to From Centre City (1994), it makes the stature of the poet convincingly clear. It is more useful than Maurice Harmon’s 1972 study of Kinsella, not only because in the succeeding decades Kinsella has developed into a finer poet with a much larger canon but also because John studies him in a wider context and probes more searchingly. Many of Kinsella’s poems exist in significantly different versions. Some were printed in periodicals before appearing in pamphlets or small volumes, which were then collected into larger volumes, nearly always with major re vision at each appearance. John’s judicious tracing of the metamorphosis of these poems, their placement in the volumes in which the versions were published, the articulation of one volume with the next, and the consequent revisiting of images and themes in changed form does not always make easy 214 reading. Frequently, however, his precise discrimination creates an excite ment that recalls one’s first reading of M.R. Ridley’s Keats’ Craftsmanship. Like Ridley’s volume, this is a study in poetic development. John’s greatest challenge stems from Kinsella’s concept of unity: “a total ity that is happening, with the individual poem a contribution to something accumulating” (192). John says: “As in the case of Yeats climbing the stairs of his Norman tower, the winding stair does more than repeat lower lev els; it includes all previous meaning and reference in an ever-burgeoning whole. The climax for Kinsella ... is numinous vision” (193). He continues: “both community and tradition are structures ... [that] enable the poet to shape chaos into order, to uncover a pattern among fragments, and to bring people, values, principles, and their antitheses — those shards of a time and culture that, separately, reflect only disharmony, alienation and disorder — into a coherent and meaningful whole” (194). These claims are impossible to illustrate and validate in a brief review, but John’s consistently clear expli cations are unassuming and convincing. This book is one of Francis Bacon’s “some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention” (50), but it should also be read only a few pages at a time, with constant rereading of Kinsella’s poetry. Proof of the soundness of John’s explication is the degree to which familiar poems are opened up and reveal new depths and fresh significance (and heightened pleasure, even when the subject matter is grim) when they are reread after the commentary...
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Jan 1, 2003
J Robert Loftis 
