SOURCE: “The Song of Thomas Kinsella,” in New Criterion, Vol. 8, No. 7, March, 1990, pp. 41-7.

In the following essay, Skloot discusses the transition in Kinsella's approach to poetry—from one of elegance and order to one of denseness and atonality—as represented in Blood and Family. According to Skloot, Kinsella's later verse, though no less impressive, sacrifices feeling for ambitious intellectual demands.

Nothing intervened between the song and its expression. The singer managed many difficult things, but the result was to focus attention on the song, not on the performance or on the quality of the voice.

—Thomas Kinsella, on hearing the old-style Irish singer Jerry Flaherty in 1959

The first day I met Thomas Kinsella, in the fall of 1969, he was questioning what a poem was. The focus was D. H. Lawrence’s “Autumn at Taos” and I remember a tremendous sense of confusion about the situation.

On the...