SOURCE: “Stretching a Thread,” in Parnassus, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring-Summer, 1981, pp. 187-98.

In the following review, Engle offers an extended analysis of Peppercanister Poems, 1972-1978. Though arguing that Kinsella's verse is at times overly personal and occasionally falls flat, Engle concludes that such “generous blunders … shouldn't obscure the fact that Kinsella is a serious poet of invention and honesty.”

Who touches this book [Peppercanister Poems, 1972–1978] touches a man. Reading these poems, I kept doubling back to Whitman’s romantic brag, even though Thomas Kinsella is as far from romantic as they come. We don’t just overhear Kinsella; we watch him ritualize a process of radical understanding and remaking. I can think of no other poet today—ecstatic primitivists like Galway Kinnell included—who has so seriously and consciously taken the myth of the self as his domain. But Kinsella rules it at some artistic peril. One problem among...