People in Dublin have had something to talk about lately other than the North, the Common Market, or the deplorable state of the Irish theatre. A few weeks ago Thomas Kinsella, the country's finest contemporary poet, published a small pamphlet (8 pages, about 250 lines of verse) called "Butcher's Dozen" and subtitled "A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery." The cover of the pamphlet carries the outline of a black coffin with the figure 13 superimposed.

In pubs, at parties, wherever literary-minded folk are likely to gather, the talk is not about the contents of the pamphlet (the Derry tragedy of January 30 [, 1972, the "Bloody Sunday" when British soldiers in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry fired upon a crowd of unarmed demonstrators, killing 13)], but about its form and style. "In matters of grave importance," Oscar Wilde once remarked, "style, not sincerity, is the vital thing"—a sentiment which has always found...