Evocative poet, Thomas Kinsella, is dead
Thomas Kinsella, an Irish poet and translator whose quest for coherence and meaning in a dark and precarious world engendered a body of work likened to the prose of James Joyce for its sense of place, died, Wednesday, in Dublin. He was 93.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Rom Massey & Sons funeral home.
In his early days, Kinsella was feted as what one critic called “probably the most accomplished, fluent and ambitious poet” of his generation. Later, though, Kinsella came to occupy “an ambivalent position in the Irish canon: central but somehow marginalized, honored but insecure, like a dethroned god,” a fellow Irish poet David Wheatley said.
Kinsella’s work was frequently described as difficult, inviting — or forcing — the reader to complete what Kinsella regarded as a central process of his poetry. “A poem, whatever else it is, is an act of communication, involving an audience,” he said in 2004. “Communication is central — an audience completing an act of communication.”
Scholar Arthur McGuinness complained in an article in 1987, “A poem by Kinsella seems almost deliberately inaccessible, almost as if the poet wanted to keep the nonserious reader out.”
Shying from conventional self-promotion, Kinsella preferred to publish his work initially in limited editions or in expensive pamphlets and rarely gave interviews or poetry readings. Some critics said his potential audience and appeal were also limited by his spending many years as an academic in the United States, chiefly at Temple University in Philadelphia; they saw it as a retreat from the Irish literary milieu.
At the same time, Kinsella seemed doomed to comparisons with Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was a decade his junior and had a wider reach.
Kinsella could be fiercely polemical and contentious in his work, as he was in “Butcher’s Dozen” (1972), a scathing response to an official British inquiry that year into the Bloody Sunday killings of 13 protesters in the Bogside area of Derry in Northern Ireland — “that brutal place / Of rage and terror and disgrace,” he wrote.