"Listening for a Breath of Wind": Peppercanister 26 & 27 by Thomas Kinsella

Enda McDonagh

Issue 387, vol.97, Autumn 2008

“But there is a mark not shared with the dumb beast / the willed, and mass, occasional destruction / of others, face to face, of the same kind”. The slaughter and sacrifice of young lives is required “for purposes not theirs to understand”. The poetic invocation of the horrors and violence of war must be given its literary due in language, image, rhythm and its consequent emotional and intellectual disturbance of the reader. Only when the reader’s response has been shaped by the poetic form and power will s/he become properly converted to the ethical essence.

Peppercanister 27 – entitled Belief and Unbelief – is also presented as two series of poems (the first series untitled). What do the randomness, the loneliness and the destruction-unto-death in some first-section poems presage, as we move on to the second section with its explicit title, Belief and Unbelief ? What effect had these opening poems on the reader? Not a comforting one, certainly. An enlightening one? (intellectually or emotionally?) – One could perhaps detect a certain cleansing, intellectual and emotional, in viewing the animal and human and artistic world. A cleansing essential to exploring authentic belief or unbelief in the following section? The exploring remains mainly indirect and its conclusion uncertain – although the last three poems might seem to the reader to favour the (re)discovery of belief.