Thomas Kinsella [is] probably the most accomplished, fluent, and ambitious Irish poet of the younger generation. American readers have already been introduced to his work in "Poems and Translations" (… 1961) but it has achieved more humanity since. In the opening sequence [of "Nightwalker,"] for example, there are several remarkable poems, where the ordeal of physical suffering … is balanced against the meaning that can be drawn from it, in personal religious terms….

This new confessional mood in Kinsella's work was announced by a sequence about married love ["Wormwood"] first published separately a few years ago. I am much less happy with these [poems] because the extreme claim that the poet makes for his personal crisis ("a great star fell from heaven") often reduces his language to the clichés of hysteria, "peaks of stress," "hells of circumstance," etc. Even the central image in the title poem, "Wormwood," has that lack...