SOURCE: “Kinsella's ‘Butcher's Dozen,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 57, No. 3, Spring, 1999, pp. 173-7.

In the following essay, Newman analyses the use of phantoms in “Butcher's Dozen” to express Kinsella's outrage over the Bloody Sunday massacre and the unjust Widgery report.

Thomas Kinsella wrote “Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery” within a week of the report made by Britain’s Lord Chief Justice Widgery of his investigation into the deaths of thirteen civilians at the hands of the British army on 30 January 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland. The poem was reissued in April 1992 to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Widgery’s report.

In the poem, phantoms represent the dead civilians and address a variety of national and cultural issues. The first phantom paraphrases the second line of the English nursery rhyme “Tom, Tom The Farmer’s Son” to establish a bitterly ironic tone...