Thomas Kinsella's Selected Poems appears simultaneously with his New Poems 1973; and although the earlier poems are on the whole less distraughtly introspective than the recent work, they display the same fine knack of delving deeply into self-communion while staying nervously responsive to an actual world. Dream and realism are cross-bred in strikingly effective combinations, not least in the excellent, ambitiously long "Phoenix Park", which roots personal relationship in a recognizable spot, tracing connecting threads between self and public history, but also exploiting that history to provide a space for complex private imaginings….

That ability to cope with elusively general feelings without losing intensity isn't so evident in some of the earlier poems. The danger there is that a way of seeing through the immediate to more "universal" issues becomes a way of talking round it, wrapping it with verbose abstractions…. There is also a difficulty with form: some...