La Terra dei Morti di Thomas Kinsella come spazio primordiale di un nuovo immaginario

Tra le numerose opere poetiche di Thomas Kinsella, Notes from the Land of the Dead, del 1973, appare quella più legata agli elementi del paesaggio fisico. In questo saggio si provano a percorrere alcune strategie cognitive e percettive che consentono al poeta irlandese di farsi interprete, attraverso di esso, di un immaginario per la rifondazione poetica del mondo, all’interno di quella che ho recentemente definito come world poetry

‘Atrocities against his Sacred Poet’

In The Midnight Verdict (1993), Seamus Heaney combines extracts from two texts taking the poet into the underworld: Ovid’s description in Metamorphoses of Orpheus’ pursuit of Eurydice and subsequent death, and Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán-Oídhche (The Midnight Court). As a poet of conflict, Heaney was forced to produce his art amid hostile crossfire. Heaney’s fellow Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon draws heavily on ironized self-sacrifice as a response to conflict in his ‘Rage for Order’ (1979). When Thomas Kinsella attempts to tackle the Northern Irish Troubles by apportioning blame to guilty parties, in Butcher’s Dozen (1972), his response to Bloody Sunday, the results are uneven. In a series of readings centred on themes of gender and the self-representation of the poet, this chapter identifies what redress Heaney, Mahon, and Kinsella find for the ‘the atrocities against his sacred poet’ of which Bacchus complains in The Midnight Verdict.

‘The Dolmen Poets’: Liam Miller and Poetry Publishing in Ireland, 1951–1961

With the publication of The Dolmen Miscellany (1962) and the inception of Poetry Ireland the same year, Liam Miller's Dolmen Press came to represent artistically and commercially Irish poets and their works within the Republic of Ireland and abroad. In Miller's publishing practice, the liberal notion of ‘Poetry Ireland’ had come to supplant a narrower one: the idea of the ‘Dolmen Poets.’ As the nineteen fifties drew to a close, the Dolmen Poets were Padraic Colum and Austin Clarke (but not Patrick Kavanagh), Richard Murphy, John Montague, and especially Thomas Kinsella. In Dolmen's earliest years, however, the notion of the ‘Dolmen Poets’ had entailed other figures – David Marcus, Donald Davie, Valentin Iremonger – as well as a “group” editorial method and small, economical print format suited to Dolmen's elementary technical facilities. When, in the ‘Dolmen Poets” format Miller printed the programme for the famous, three-way reading by Murphy, Montague, and Kinsella at the Royal Hibernian Hotel on 3 February 1961, both the occasion and the souvenir programme signalled Miller's embracing of the concept of ‘Poetry Ireland’.