SOURCE: A review of The Pen Shop, in World Literature Today, Vol. 72, No. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 147-8.

In the following review, Pratt offers an unfavorable assessment of The Pen Shop.

Thomas Kinsella is one of the most gifted living poets, as earlier volumes have testified, one of them a translation from the Irish of The Táin or Cattle-Raid of Cooley that has already become a standard reference for early Irish literature and Celtic mythology. But the thin volume of poems titled The Pen Shop hardly does him justice, since its cover photograph of the mythical hero Cuchulain, taken from a bronze statue that stands today in the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin, where the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 battled bravely and lost to the British, has little to do with the sequence of short poems inside, though Kinsella gives a verbal description...