SOURCE: A review of Collected Poems, 1956-1994, in World Literature Today, Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer, 1998, p. 622.

In the following review of Collected Poems, 1956-1994, Quinlan comments on Kinsella's literary career and ambiguous critical status.

In the early 1960s, Thomas Kinsella reigned as Ireland’s foremost poet. His work was sophisticated, its settings frequently urban, local but with a cosmopolitan flavor, and seemed reflective of an Ireland moving into a new and more prosperous era (a move that was partly due to innovative policies in the Department of Finance, the branch of the Irish government in which Kinsella was at the time employed at a senior level), exercised about the past without being driven by its questionable pieties. Much of the poetry appealed to the sensibilities of the isolated individual, as in “Mirror in February” from his 1962 collection, Downstream:

Below my window the awakening trees, Hacked clean for better bearing...