The major part of Thomas Kinsella's New Poems 1973 is a collection … called Notes from the Land of the Dead, a corny confessionalist title for a puzzling work. Its theme is the spiritual journey from despair and desolation, "nightnothing", to a painful self-renewal, a progress that seems to be developed in both the overall sequence and individual pieces within it. One says "seems" because a great deal of this territory is very vague indeed. One of the troubles is that these are notes, not poems, as the rows of dots petering out lines, the asterisks between verse sections, and the blurb caveat that Mr Kinsella is "content to leave inessential connections unmade and miscellaneous doubts unresolved", suggest.

The other is that, as notes, they are not very informative; our man in the land of the dead has cabled back little hard news. This is not to deny that there...