Thomas Kinsella is a long-established poet of a much older generation whose Selected Poems go back to the 1950s. He begins writing with the tune of Yeats's stanza in his ear;

Dread, a grey devourer
Stalks in the shade of love.

In the early books, what is bookish is often best.

We drifted in peace and talked
                                  of poetry.
I opened the Cantos, and chose
                       the silken kings
Luminous with crisis.

With "Phoenix Park", however, phrases begin to strike home with an individual shock: "You lay still, brilliant with illness, behind glass."

And his autobiographical poems become altogether unsentimental. He remembers being sent to say goodbye to a dying grandmother, looking at a mouth still lined with ill-temper, and failing to kiss the dying woman.

In one of the most original of these early poems, a child is seen from the perspective of a battered cuddly animal, and so reminds us of the frightening volatility of human mood swings.

As the book progresses we make out a deep distrust of the human spirit: "The irreducible malice and greed of the species."

His flat propositions are irrefutable.

What is there to understand?
Time punishes - and this the 
                       flesh teaches.

An Irish nationalist, who has spent mush of his life translating Irish poetry while teaching in the United States, his vision is as uncomfortable as Samuel Beckett's; most of the people in his poems are blown by:

a poverty of spirit in the 
                                     wind,
a shabby richness in braving it.