Butcher’s Dozen – Arthur Beesley on Thomas Kinsella’s poem about Bloody Sunday and a judicial whitewash

Soon after the Saville report finally laid bare in 2010 the barbarous truth of the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972, poet Thomas Kinsella reflected on his own role in the aftermath of that violent January day in Derry.

Kinsella, who died at 93 in December, was a giant of poetry known to generations of Leaving Certificate students as the only living poet on the curriculum.

After Lord Widgery’s blatant whitewash of what really went on when British troops shot dead 13 unarmed civilians in Derry, he famously rushed out a poem by way of a strident indictment in verse. Butcher’s Dozen was written and released within days of Widgery’s April 1972 report, reflecting rage in the raw at findings that were a travesty of truth.

"I certainly ran into trouble with the poem," Kinsella told Adrienne Leavy in an interview for New Hibernia Review in July 2010, the month after the Saville report was published.

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Butcher's Dozen reads still like a laceration – and it proved contentious, even though the long quest for the truth vindicated him. Poet Harry Clifton wrote once in these pages that the work was "lauded and savaged equally". Kinsella lost friends, readers and critical acclaim in Britain and was accused in some quarters of commercialising his work. At one point he said the poem cost him "90 per cent of my British audience" and noted that it had stayed that way ever since.

“Some responded as I hoped they would, because I had published it instantly – it was written and published in a week, operating like a tenpenny pamphlet or a news sheet,” he told Leavy. “Others didn’t think that poetry was the medium for discussion; or that I was qualified to discuss. Some thought I had written it for money, or for public attention.”

The poem was recently republished by Carcanet Poetry of Manchester to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, which was commemorated today in Derry. This elegant, slim volume includes a short prologue extracted from the Saville report, an epilogue drawn from the House of Commons apology for the killings by then UK prime minister David Cameron and a short note by Kinsella himself.

But it is the poem itself which stands out, stretching out over eight livid pages that open with formidable lines as he sighs and looks about a “brutal place of rage and terror and disgrace”:

“I went with Anger at my heel Through Bogside of the bitter zeal – Jesus pity! – on a day of cold and drizzle and decay. A month had passed. Yet there remained A murder smell that stung and stained.”

Kinsella writes in the note that the poem was not written in response to the fatal shooting of the 13, saying there were too many dead on all sides. “The poem was written in response to the report of the Widgery tribunal. In Lord Widgery’s cold putting aside of truth, the nth in a historic series of expedient falsehoods – with prejudice literally wigged out as justice – it was evident that we were suddenly very close to the operations of the evil real causes,” he states.

“I couldn’t write the same poem now. The pressures were special, the insult strongly felt and the timing vital if the response was to matter, in all its kinetic impurity.”

The poet, whose first major collection was published in 1958, was well established when Butcher’s Dozen appeared.

But it was the first work published in pamphlet form under his own Peppercanister imprint, a nod to the popular name for St Stephen’s Church, across the Grand Canal from his Dublin home.

It was followed, in July 1972, by A Selected Life, a funeral poem in memory of the composer Seán Ó Riada, who died in October 1971, and, later, Vertical Man, set on the first anniversary of Ó Riada’s death. The Good Fight came in November 1973, marking the tenth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination.

From Inchicore in Dublin, Kinsella started out with ambitions to become a physicist but stayed only for one term of science in UCD, realising quickly that that life was not for him. He was a senior official in the Department of Finance before leaving, as his poetry career advanced, to take up academic posts in the US.

He began by writing in Irish but found it was always English that surfaced under pressure. “The decision made itself.” Decades of poetry followed, by turns lyrical, meditative, intimate, evocative, enquiring, searching of self and the world around him.

Kinsella told Leavy that the response to Butcher’s Dozen raised issues around people’s approach to poetry. “They tend to have specific expectations. The fact that poetry is an accurate medium for the expression in permanent form of any kind of significant reality is not generally understood.”