SOURCE: “Energy in Purging,” in Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 1994, p. 28.

In the following review, Matthews offers a positive assessment of Poems from Centre City.

In their tone and address, the poems in From Centre City mark both a furtherance of, and a departure from, the themes magisterially explored in Thomas Kinsella’s earlier work. The ghostly presences which have shadowed his nightmare limbo worlds from Downstream (1962) onwards, and which mediated the immediate political anger and hurt in his “lesson” for the Widgery Tribunal on the Bloody Sunday massacre, Butcher’s Dozen (1972), establish in this latest collection a pervading note of personal loss, of reminiscence, and more pointedly of departure.

That note of hurt is often sounded again here, as Kinsella sets down the reasons for his recent move from Dublin, the city of his childhood and of most of his working life. He has often been seen as...