Collected Poems

"I became very friendly with Thomas Kinsella by a series of accidents. I had studied him at school and even taught him but could not understand him properly and felt he was doing something that I would need to do, although I couldn’t follow exactly what it was. So I spent a number of years speaking to him, on and off, and studying him, and even publishing him in a wonderful series of poems that he has done called the ‘Peppercanister’. They are maybe 20-24 pages in length, where he explores a particular experience or viewpoint and they came out over the years in beautifully produced limited editions and now they are collectors’ items. They are absolutely delightful pieces, going deeper and deeper into the personal life of a person living in Ireland, coping with ordinary things but also coping with pain and suffering. It’s his middle period. They began with a very strange piece called ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ which was a response to the Widgery report in response to the shooting dead of 13 people in Derry. This came out of a very angry pamphlet, which was selling for a shilling, and it actually turned out to be a format for working on interim poems that has worked enormously well for him. He then dealt with various topics like his early years, his relationship with his father, the changes that Dublin city was undergoing, the relationship to his own illnesses and the darkness that he saw around him. So each Peppercanister as it came out was different, was a development of the earlier work. So I saw a man in the process of making poetry, not philosophical but almost scalpel-like in its dissection of what living is all about. And the language is very simple, it also uses the kind of openness that Tranströmer has but with a very strong intellectual base to it. The professionalism of it was just so wonderful. I founded Poetry Ireland partly to say to audiences and to poets, let’s put poetry on a more rational, developmental basis, rather than just people coming into pubs and listening to poets muttering while the till is tinkling and people are coughing. The poet might be lucky to get a Guinness for his work. You don’t? There are lots of poetry readings and they are very good for sustaining poetry here. Kinsella influenced poetry with this notion of poetry not as just haphazard lyrics, a collection of occasional lyrics, but lyrics that gather and grow to form a complete study of living. We’ve also had some interesting discussions on the idea of God and he has often challenged me in that area. No, indeed, but in his later work he has been certainly circling the notion, which is exciting. He certainly is touching on the subject."