THOMAS KINSELLA is the dark star of Irish poetry. For 40 years those involved with the art on this island have felt the massive gravitational pull of his personality, drawn towards and sometimes repelled by his long, slow consumption of self in, for and by poetry. This process, a kind of nuclear implosion of seriousness, mitigated by a comic sense of self absurdity, has not, however, been visible to the world at large - mainly, one suspects, because Kinsella has chosen to hide his light under the bushel of the Peppercanister Press, an enterprise which, despite its excellence, may have cost him the Nobel Prize.
Lacking the influence of an international publisher, Kinsella has also been short of powerful advocates in criticism. The Whole Matter is, in fact, the first full length study of the poet. As such it is a useful and sympathetic operation, identifying most of the main themes in a densely compacted oeuvre, particularly those which connect Kinsella with his avatar Carl Jung.
Jackson, professor of English at Bryn Mawr, is not entirely at home with Irish history, literary or political - he thinks, for instance, that magazines of the late Forties and early Fifties would "over and over" yield the name of James Liddy (born 1934), and that "genocide was ... aided by the natural calamity of the Familie".
The weakness of Jackson's grasp on such matters is, however, insignificant compared to the "tentavity" (tentativeness?) of his hold on ordinary meaning and English prose. What, for instance, is one to make of "a vision of primitive or rudimentary or demonic humanity that has not saved from "nature" . . . against which ... are to be ranged the more humane manifestations of consciousness"? Or of the description of shaving as "a downward tending course of meaningless repetitions"? Perhaps "a reader can be forgiven for feeling that these two copalimpsests imply some possibly fundamental tertium quid"? Forgiveness may indeed be possible in these circumstances, but three Hail Marys would hardly be adequate as a penance.
One feels, nevertheless, a sympathy with Jackson's plight, given the difficulty and complexity of Kinsella's world view. Levi Strauss remarks, in his book on totemism, that things which are not fully understood may not be used as constituents of an explanation - but what is a proper prohibition in discourse is fundamental to poetry. When a poet, like Kinsella, deliberately attempts to transform himself from a perceptive into a conceptive being - the perception so intimate, the conception so universal, and both inchoate - it is not surprising to find a critic getting lost in the fog. All the same, some of this dark is light enough.
Gerald Dawe also discusses Kinsella (usefully comparing him to Montale) as well as the work of, among others, Durcan, Fiacc, Heaney, Hewitt, Montague, MacNeice, and Mahon. It is not, even so, an exhaustive list, but, as he neatly says, "in forming a tradition, exclusions confirm the rule".
Although he inclines to the cobwebbed belief that "we have a naturally poetic language, because of the once central influence of the Irish language upon English as it is spoken in the country outside Dublin" - not much hope there for a native Dort speaker - Dawe is refreshingly acute on the way Irishness is often used to pad out otherwise thin imaginations. "Poetry in Ireland is," he says, "mostly an accepted form of the tradition, and most poets voice ideas and beliefs totally at one with official cultural: orthodoxies.
Concentrating on "thematic bias" does, however, lead him into essentially historicist argument and away from considerations of aesthetic worth. He says, for instance, that the "poet communes: with and through language to form and abstract and rhetorical recognition out of his/her own poetic consciousness" an illustrates the point by this quotation from Tom Paulin: "I'm tense now: talk of sharing power,/ prophecies of civil war,/new reasons for a secular/ mode of voicing the word nation/ set us on edge, this generation,/ and force the poet to play traitor/ or act the half sure legislator". But what isn't poetry should not be used as an example of it.
Compared to Jackson's, Dawe's prose is mercifully simple, though he does incline occasionally to mix his metaphors for instance "interstices . . . glut into. . . a pull". But there is a deal of provocative thinking here.