BLOOD AND FAMILY
By Thomas Kinsella.
89 pp. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Paper, $9.95.

SUN
By Michael Palmer.
86 pp. San Francisco:
North Point Press. Paper, $9.95.

Plain styles are all alike, but every obscurity is obscure in its own way. Thomas Kinsella has entered his seventh decade in full possession of his ancient angers, derived from the continuing corruption and crisis of Ireland. Mr. Kinsella has always been a poet most powerful when his politics were personal, when the shattered recollections of family were refracted through the impersonal brutalities of a state so given to sentiment and the easy hypocrisies of religion. The ruptured style toward which his verse has been tending was chipped out of an early sub-Georgianism, with its lays and legends, and a thin Yeatsian anguish and splendor. The poet who in his 20's could write ''two lips / Were seen to break the crests of speech in fair order'' and ''O Rome thou art, at coffee-break, O Rome'' seemed confused whether he was mocking a style or being murdered by it. It is a distance from that to:

Corded into a thick dressing gown
he glared from his rocker
at people whispering on television.

He knocked the last drops of Baby Power
into his glass and carried the lifewater
to his lips. He recollected himself

and went on with a story out of Guinness's.

The emphasis on ''whispering'' absorbs the strain of overhearing as well as the volume of the old man's complaint. The old man is Mr. Kinsella's father, and in such whispers of mortality the poet finds the ''appalling, appealing'' voices that counteract the susceptibilities of a culture gone from teleology to television in a generation.

''Blood and Family'' begins with this elegy for his father and ends with a fractured sequence on Mother Ireland, inscribing the history of the Irish revolt in the ink of family and old engravings. That spread of subject, though subsumed within the family drama that makes every parent a sovereign power, and every government try to act in loco parentis, suggests the powerful inherency required to make poetry out of an imagination now drawn to fragmentary organization, and to utterances increasingly doubtful of their own sufficiency. The book itself is a willed construction, each of its five sections having been separately published as a pamphlet by Mr. Kinsella's own Peppercanister Press. The sections, which also include a sequence about the poet's childhood, a homage to Mahler and an elegy for the Irish composer and musician Sean O'Riada, find their orders in disorder, or in the imposed musical structure that serves as an armature for the poem about Mahler:

For there are great iron entities
afloat like towns erect on the water
with new murderous skills,

and there are thunderclouds gathered
on our perimeter, and the Empire
turns once more toward its farrow.

That excoriating note, at once murderous and elliptical, is from the first movement of a poem that arrives, after an intermezzo and a second movement, at a coda where the Fall of Man has become a pratfall (''I lift my / baton and my / trousers fall''). One can find the murderous note in other poets, particularly in Geoffrey Hill, who feel a similar trepidation where the fate of empire and the false hints of religion intersect. One does not find elsewhere, however, a profoundly disturbing and disturbed meditative consciousness rising to the giddy delights of the conductor's falling trousers or

that last lovely heartbeat
of the whole world
like a low terrible string plucked
Ah Whoom
on the great Harp of Life.

It is tempting to forget Thomas Kinsella when younger Irish poets, led by Seamus Heaney, have taken the battered and bartered history of Ireland as a condition that can be accommodated or ignored, but not denied. Mr. Kinsella can still entertain the tragic possibilities, and his powerful recollective passions serve as an affront to a present that can only serve the past. His new poems are his darkest, and the least vulnerable to easy understanding; they survive in the jolt of juxtaposition and the shudder of meaning beneath the surface. His own difficult rectitude guarantees the precision and tonalities of this splendid, uneasy, moving book.

Amid the calm fatuities and self-satisfactions of much conventional verse there is little that challenges, and poets swollen with the experimental impulse should not be blamed for attempting to overthrow a poetry so frequently submissive to triviality and caution. We are now almost comfortable with Mallarme, Stein and John Ashbery, though there remains a delightful whiff of fraudulence around the last two. Why should we not rise in rage at and later retire in delight with the language poets, or with Michael Palmer?

Reading Mr. Palmer's poetry is like listening to serial music or slamming your head against a streetlight stanchion - somewhere, you're sure, masochists are lining up to enjoy the very same thing, but for most people the only pleasure it can possibly have is the pleasure of its being over. ''Sun'' consists of six poems, two of which are titled ''Sun'' and two of which are titled ''C''; that is appropriate in a poet who finds repetition a significant form of meaning, even when it signifies (as in T. S. Eliot, let us remember) drought rather than fruitfulness. ''Meaning'' is a fraught term for such a poet, whose work takes its form in violent juxtaposition, slips of syntax, in randomness and cacophony and the complacencies of the indeterminate, and in frequent reference to the act of writing and the theory of language. In ''Baudelaire Series'' the poet says:

A hundred years ago I made a book
and in that book I left a spot
and on that spot I placed a seme

with the mechanism of the larynx
around an inky center
leading backward-forward.

That perhaps raises to consciousness the art behind the act, but it also trivializes art in favor of semantic theory, and does so in a fashion quite foreign to Baudelaire, who knew very well how to crush the reader's expectation without emotional dilettantism. Baudelaire would have eaten Mr. Palmer for breakfast, with salt.

In Mr. Palmer's work, language is frequently reduced to its surface gestures:

Paper universe of primes
Flooded land flooded hand

House: herself in the mirror photographing herself

lies over then under

reticular figures

both speaking/

not speaking.

When the field of meaning is so weakly generated, such fragments supply a coherence never more than contingent, and the disconnected particulars can flaunt but never inhere. A poetry that has fled the ingratitudes of meaning, that has abandoned so much of technique, cannot survive on the contemplation of technique alone.

My complaint is not that this poetry raises a challenge, but that it is not challenging enough. Mr. Palmer's tone is frequently mild-mannered and obliging, more retrograde than revolutionary, and his lines slip all too easily into the pretentiousness (''The opening is read by the tongue / momently for the dead now'') and sentiment (''You, island in this page / image in this page / What if things really did / correspond, silk to breath / evening to eyelid / thread to thread'') that it pretends to deplore. At such times obscurity seems the pursuit of sentimentality by other means.

Even in the general collapse of impulse there are suggestive lines: ''from moment to memory a swollen debt'' or ''And you married to that clown, that ape, that gribbling assassin of light,'' where ''gribbling'' seems a trouvaille on the order of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ''Grimpen Mire.'' In one long passage the disjunctions fall brokenly upon the mutilated corpses of political victims, and there the method is suddenly justified by descent into politics of such enormity that they cannot be reconciled with linear narrative. Large claims have been made for language poetry, especially by critics who think derangements of semantics or syntax are revolutionary and likely to overthrow the existing orders of power. That is a romantic thought, and one that probably would not have occurred to Robespierre, Thomas Paine, Lenin or Frantz Fanon, who had more use for the plain statement, or the plain lie. Compared even to the revolutionary modernists, who reveled in disjunction, language poetry seems a parlor game.