SOURCE: “Hard Men, Soft Men,” in New Statesman, January 16, 1987, p. 30.

In the following excerpt, Lucas faults Kinsella for overly rhetorical language and a lack of distinctness in Poems, 1956–1973.

The Ulster poet W. R. Rodgers claimed to speak for ‘an abrupt people / Who like the consonants in speech / And think the soft ones cissy’. Thomas Kinsella, who is from the South, is certainly no cissy, but for much of the earlier part of his career [as in Poems, 1956-1973] he seems to have fought shy of spikiness, whether of utterance or of thought.

It would be all too easy to characterise the poetry of this period as soft and this is at least partly because he favours a kind of lush rhetoric whose characteristic movement is slow, at best with a certain grave music, at worst spongy, inert. ‘Flowers whose names I do not know / Make happy signals to...