Publisher Description

This is a career-spanning selection of the essays and reviews of one of the greatest living Irish poets. This book makes widely available for the first time several key works in modern Irish literature, such as Kinsella's classic essay on the Gaelic poetry tradition. Thomas Kinsella was recently awarded the Freedom of Dublin City, an accolade given to a select few that has included John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa.This title contains essays on W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Austin Clarke, Louis le Brocquy and Sean O Riada. Also included are Kinsella's insightful discussions of his own poetry, some of them previously unpublished. Thomas Kinsella's career as an astute literary reviewer is reflected in assessments of work by W.H. Auden, Donald Davie, William Empson, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, and Marianne Moore, among others. Thomas Kinsella is widely known as the translator of "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed".

Notes

A collection of essays and reviews on poems, written between 1951-2006.

Author Biography

Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928. He attended University College, Dublin, entering the Civil Service in 1946. He has taught in the United States and established and administered the Irish Tradition study programme in Dublin, retiring in 1992. He was a director of the Dolmen Press and Cuala Press, Dublin, and in 1972 established Peppercanister Press. He is best known as a major poet (published by Dolmen, Peppercanister and Oxford University Press), a translator and a radical anthologist (of the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse).

Review

"Kinsella is by now the most formidable presence in Irish poetry, a man whose work has achieved a community and sustained power which is all the more impressive when we look at the comparatively scattered and broken achievements of predecessors like Devlin, Clarke and Kavanagh. R.F. Garfitt, Modern Irish Poetry 'He is the great poet of the Republic as surely as Seamus Heaney is the poet laureate of Northern Ireland. From the early, precise metrical poems like 'Baggot Street Deserta' to the post-Poundian sweep and ambition of the present cycle of 'Peppercannister Poems', Thomas Kinsella continues to write in an innovative and mind-stretching way.' The Irish Times"

Long Description

This is a career-spanning selection of the essays and reviews of one of the greatest living Irish poets. This book makes widely available for the first time several key works in modern Irish literature, such as Kinsella's classic essay on the Gaelic poetry tradition. Thomas Kinsella was recently awarded the Freedom of Dublin City, an accolade given to a select few that has included John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa.This title contains essays on W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Austin Clarke, Louis le Brocquy and Sean O Riada. Also included are Kinsella's insightful discussions of his own poetry, some of them previously unpublished. Thomas Kinsella's career as an astute literary reviewer is reflected in assessments of work by W.H. Auden, Donald Davie, William Empson, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, and Marianne Moore, among others. Thomas Kinsella is widely known as the translator of "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed".

Details