‘Never altogether the same. But the same’: strategies of revision in Thomas Kinsella's Notes from the Land of the Dead

Abstract

The publishing history of Notes from the Land of the Dead is a complex one, heralding a change in Kinsella's attitude towards textual revision and volume publication. This article explores the ways in which the evolution of key poems from this collection demonstrates altering aesthetic priorities, while at the same time calling attention to the issue of continuity in Kinsella's work as a whole. His committed engagement with difficult and increasingly irreconcilable ideas can be traced in his rethinking and repositioning of these poems.

Keywords:

• Kinsella
• poetics
• revision
• transition
• subjectivity

Notes

 1. Derval Tubridy links the idea of ‘keeping going’ to Kinsella's evolving poetic style, highlighting the significant influence of American poets, such as Pound, Williams and Lowell. Tubridy, Thomas Kinsella, 3.

 2. O'Driscoll, ‘Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 63.

 3. Badin, ‘From “An Interview with Thomas Kinsella”’, 114–15.

 4. The main texts for comparison are Kinsella, Notes from the Land of the Dead and Kinsella, Collected Poems 1956–1994. This maintains clarity while maximising the demonstration of the poet's development.

 5. O'Driscoll, ‘Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 58.

 6. Fried, ‘Omphalos of Scraps’, 3–25.

 7. Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 84.

 8. Harmon, The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella, 90.

 9. Matthews, Irish Poetry, 86.

10. Dawe, Against Piety, 60.

11. In a rare revision in this poem, the line is ‘loosened’ further to: ‘Her grey hair // was loosened out like a young woman's / all over the pillow / mixed with the shadows …’ (1996, 104).

12. Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage, 105.

13. ‘Phoenix Park’, the poem that immediately precedes this collection, is directly autobiographical in focus, as are others from Nightwalker and Other Poems . The earliest publications, Poems ( 1956 ) and Another September ( 1958 ), also draw explicitly on material from the poet's life.

14. Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, 188.

15. C.G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, 59.

16. Julia Kristeva develops this issue in the opening chapter of Powers of Horror.