SOURCE: “The Collected Poems of Thomas Kinsella,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. CVI, No. 2, Spring, 1998, pp. 343-58.

In the following positive review of Collected Poems, 1956-1994, Skloot provides an overview of Kinsella's literary career and artistic development.

Over the last fifteen years, an impressive array of older Irish poets has published their collected poems. Some, including John Montague and Richard Murphy, have substantial international reputations. Others such as Brian Coffey, Padraic Fallon, James Liddy, and, posthumously, Denis Devlin, John Hewitt, Thomas MacGreevy, and W. R. Rodgers, are known or regarded less highly. During the same period, dozens of mature Irish poets—Eavan Boland, John F. Deane, Seamus Deane, Paul Durcan, Peter Fallon, Padraic Fiacc, Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin among them—issued their selected poems. Conspicuous by his absence from this surge of retrospection had been Thomas Kinsella, perhaps...