SOURCE: “‘Bright Quincunx Newly Risen’: Thomas Kinsella's Inward ‘I’,” in Eire-Ireland, Vol. XV, No. 4, Winter, 1980, p. 106-25.

In the following essay, McGuinness discusses the intersection of physical, psychological, and symbolic landscapes in Kinsella's poetry, particularly as they reveal multiple levels of consciousness and the poet's journey toward the inner self.

The cover design for Thomas Kinsella’s recently published volume One and Other Poems (1979) features a character which can be read either as a large Roman numeral one, or as the personal pronoun “I.” Both meanings relate to the search for self, which has been the poet’s major theme for a quarter of a century. A radically alienated poet for much of his career, Kinsella has in his latest poems proposed memory, dream, and imagination as doors out of the dark.¹ Kinsella’s search for self, a quest mapped by landscape imagery, has brought him from the...