THOMAS KINSELLA:THE POET AND THE BOOKExhibition

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There are established personal placesthat receive our lives’ heatand adapt in their mass, like stone.

These absorb in their changesthe radiance of change in us,and give it back

to the darkness of our understanding,directionlessinto the returning cold.

from Personal Places (1990)

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THOMAS KINSELLA: THE POET AND THE BOOK

BEGINNINGSThomas Kinsella is a unique figure among twentieth-century Irish poets. Aswriter, translator and anthologist he has influenced the course of modern Irishwriting, and illuminated the relationship between English and Irish languagetraditions. The complete collection of his publications sheds light on the importantlinks between the writing and publishing of poetry in twentieth-century Ireland.

Kinsella first came to UCD in 1946 to study science, and though thissubject did not prove to be his vocation, a fascination with how things work wouldbe an enduring dimension of his poetry. He left UCD to take up a position in theCivil Service, returning to join the evening degree programme in Arts. By thistime he was becoming involved in Dublin’s literary scene – his earliest writing,both creative and critical, appeared in the National Student magazine. This workshows the breadth of Kinsella’s intellectual curiosity at the time, and revealsglimpses of his developing talent for poetic form. Soon he was introduced to LiamMiller, who had recently founded the Dolmen Press; the two men would go on toform an important collaborative relationship.

Kinsella’s work was prominent among Dolmen’s early publications. TheStarlit Eye, which appeared early in 1952, was the fourth item to emerge from theDolmen Press, and it was handset by Kinsella himself in Bodoni type. This type– and the press on which the work was printed – had been given to Miller byCecil ffrench Salkeld who, together with his mother Blanaid Salkeld, had run theGayfield Press. Later in 1952 Miller published another gathering by Kinsella,Three Legendary Sonnets, in a similar design. Within two years of these earlyprintings, The Breastplate of Saint Patrick appeared. This was Kinsella’s firsttranslation of an early Irish text and it was reset twice in the ensuing seven years.This pattern indicated both Miller’s commitment to the young poet, and hiswillingness to rethink elements of book design, even after the work had beenpublished. It also signalled the important combination of original and translatedpoetry, both as formative of Kinsella’s creative sensibility and as a hallmark ofDolmen’s identity as a press.

EARLY DOLMEN BOOKSThe collaboration with Dolmen Press was formative for Kinsella, offering animportant space for aesthetic development and creative collaboration. Working with

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a Dublin-based publisher was important to him, though at this stage in his careerthe subject matter of his poems was not especially Irish. His chief influence duringthese early years was W. H. Auden: ‘Reading Auden, it occurred to me that therewas a similar need in myself, and that I could write poetry’. Kinsella’s firstsubstantial collection was simply titled Poems and appeared in 1956 withillustrations by Elizabeth Rivers. It typifies the handsome design of Dolmenvolumes and was an important precursor to Another September (1958), which LiamMiller regarded as Dolmen’s first fully professional book. In that volume, most ofthe poems from the 1956 book were reprinted, and the twenty-eight poems that weregathered represented the striking technical accomplishment of Kinsella’s earlywork, less than ten years after his first student publications. Self-awareness isevident, both in theme and craft – these are poems that are mindful of tradition but,as Kinsella himself remarked, are ‘influenced by literature more than by fact’. ThePoetry Book Society selected Another September as their Spring Choice, which wasan important achievement both for poet and publisher.

This success did not alter Miller’s pattern of publishing short works byKinsella however. He followed Another September two years later with Moralities,a chapbook of seventeen poems with designs after Dürer. As the first sustainedsequence that Kinsella had published, this volume was formally important in hisdevelopment. It was also significant in combining classical form with socialawareness. The 1960s marked a deepening of Kinsella’s enquiry into humansuffering, and a certain restlessness in both life and art. Downstream (1962)meditates on transformation, and its title poem was one that Kinsella would continueto revise for more than thirty years. The publication of Wormwood (1966) andNightwalker (1967) – a volume that appeared with both Oxford University Pressand New York publisher Knopf in 1968 – marked the development of Kinsella’smature style.

THE ART OF TRANSLATION: THE TÁINDuring these years, Kinsella was also engaged in a translation project that wouldresult in the most beautiful Irish-made book of the twentieth century, The Táin. Thestarting point of this Dolmen project was Kinsella’s remarkable 1954 translationof The Sons of Usnech which appeared in two editions: the first with illustrationsby Mia Cranwill in the Celtic style; the second in a larger print run reset withBridget Swinton’s free line drawings. Liam Miller was eager for the poet to extendhis translation skills to the Táin Bó Cuailnge – The Cattle Raid of Cooley – thecentrepiece of the Ulster Cycle. This was a text that combined verse and prose,

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but the challenges it presented served to confirm Kinsella’s dedication to the craftof translation. He immersed himself in the study of early Irish texts and workedpainstakingly to create a satisfactory response to what he described as the ‘verydisorderly world’ of the original work. The project brought Kinsella and Louis leBrocquy into close collaboration. Le Brocquy produced hundreds of drawingsand over 130 of these were included in the volume, together with maps andreproductions from the original Irish manuscript sources. The firm elegance ofthe Pilgrim font enhanced the concentrated force of le Brocquy’s brushwork,bringing text and image into artistic unity. The Táin took more than 15 years tocomplete, during which time Kinsella left his position in the Department of Finance,taking up a post as poet-in-residence at the University of Southern Illinois.

As the Táin project illustrated, Kinsella’s commitment to the translation ofIrish language texts became central to his contribution to Irish letters and was tohave an important influence on his role as anthologist. An Duanaire 1600-1900:Poems of the Dispossessed (1981) was a collaboration with Seán Ó Tuama, reprintinga range of original Irish texts with Kinsella’s translations. Five years later Kinsellawas commissioned to edit the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse and again he placedconsiderable emphasis on poetry in the Irish language, addressing the customaryprominence of work in English from the Revival period onward. His critical workfrom 1995, The Dual Tradition, directly explored the important relationship betweenthe two languages.

PEPPERCANISTER POEMSIn 1972, Kinsella wrote and published Butcher’s Dozen, describing it as a ‘necessaryresponse’ to the Widgery Tribunal of that year which exonerated the soldiersinvolved in the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry. It was ‘finished, printed andpublished within a week’ and Kinsella chose a cheap, disposable format – its buffpaper covers and crude design in keeping with the poem’s rhetorical purpose. Thisradical poetic intervention required a different mode of publishing from Kinsella’sprevious work, and the manner of the poem’s appearance would also prompt asustained alteration in Kinsella’s publishing practice.

Butcher’s Dozen thus became the first volume in the Peppercanister series.This venture, devised by Kinsella as a means of publishing single long poems orshort sequences of poems at irregular intervals, owed much to Liam Miller’sDolmen chapbooks. The early Peppercanister pamphlets are likewise characterisedby a flexible approach to design: in contrast to Butcher’s Dozen, the second volume– A Selected Life – was presented in a large elegant format. This was the first of

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two publications (the other being Vertical Man) to concern the life and work ofmusician and composer Sean Ó Riada; their attention to design is in keeping withthe artistic subject matter. The fourth volume, by contrast, marked a return to thecheap printing format, being another occasional poem – this time published incommemoration of the tenth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy.

The Peppercanister project continues to offer Kinsella an opportunity forconcentrated reflection on particular preoccupations, from the testing of selfwithin a mythological framework in One (1974) to the nature of the creative actitself, explored in Fat Master (2011). Mutability is paradoxically among Kinsella’smost enduring themes, and it is also present in this creative mode: many of thesepoems have been substantially – and repeatedly – revised for inclusion in laterpublications. The Peppercanister series helps us to see Kinsella’s writing asprovisional rather than monumental, making each poem open to new discoveriesby poet and reader alike.

Dr Lucy CollinsUCD School of English, Drama and FilmI would like to acknowledge the help and support of the following in the James JoyceLibrary, University College Dublin: Evelyn Flanagan, Eugene Roche and VanessaBuckley in Special Collections, Ursula Byrne and University Librarian Dr. John B.Howard. Thanks also to designer Ger Garland. I’m especially grateful to Thomasand Eleanor Kinsella who made this exhibition possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHYHaffenden, John. ‘Thomas Kinsella.’ Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John

Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. 100-13Harmon, Maurice. Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs. Dublin: Irish

Academic Press, 2008.Kinsella, Thomas. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2001.Miller, Liam. Dolmen XXV: An Illustrated Bibliography of the Dolmen Press 1951-

1976. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976.Skloot, Floyd. ‘The Evolving Poetry of Thomas Kinsella.’ New England Review

18.4 (1997): 174-87.Tubridy, Derval. Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems. Dublin: UCD Press,

2001.

IMAGE CREDITSFront cover: Liam Miller illustration from The Starlit Eye (detail). Inside front cover: St Stephen’sChurch, nicknamed the Peppercanister, on Mount Street Crescent Dublin (David Soanes). Inside backcover: Covers of Out of Ireland, Another September, The Táin and National Student Oct-Nov 1952. Backcover: A Technical Supplement.

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