SOURCE: “The Radiance of Change: The Collected Poems of Thomas Kinsella,” in Shenandoah, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 116-25.

In the following review of Collected Poems, 1956-1994, Skloot discusses the recurring themes, artistic concerns, stylistic innovations, and cumulative motifs found in Kinsella's poetry over a period of forty years.

In the 1950’s, when the generation of American poets that included John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and James Wright was coming of age, poets of the previous generation were writing some of their finest work. John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke were thriving; Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams were still alive. A similar generational ladder existed for Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Jennings, Peter Porter and Charles Tomlinson in England, where Basil Bunting, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender loomed. Above these all, switching countries...