For Poems 1956–1973 Kinsella selects items from his first six volumes and prints all of his New Poems (1973). The early pieces help prepare the reader for the seventeen poems, "Notes from the Land of the Dead," the central lyric works of his early career. These poems celebrate Dublin, Kinsella's home, and the pangs and anxieties attending his own development as man and writer. He is the cursed poet come back from the Irish night with a story. (p. 633)

[Kinsella] writes on the fine old subjects, and like a proper Irish poet, he has learned his trade. He writes of family, the appalling loneliness of moderns, the pain of death and separation. He calls birth "the count of zero." He is dazzled by and hopeful in modern isolation. (pp. 633-34)

Kinsella's poems are direct, immediate, colloquial as park-bench speech and, suddenly, moving. He is not quotable because Kinsella has to...