SOURCE: “The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella,” in America, March 18, 1995, pp. 30-5.

In the following review, Skloot discusses Kinsella's literary career and artistic development in the context of Poems from Centre City.

‘There are established personal places / that receive our lives’ heat / and adapt in their mass, like stone,” Irishman Thomas Kinsella says in one of the new poems in his 1994 collection entitled From Centre City. This is true about actual places he focuses on, such places as “The Stable,” “The Back Lane,” “Departure Platforms,” meeting rooms, literary pubs or the childhood home. It is also true about places within the self where the poet habitually retreats, as well as the “Peppercanister” (St. Stephen’s Church) and the ongoing poetic venture with which he has long been occupied—the growing mass of interconnected work he has built with each new publication.

In “At the Head Table,” when the speaker...