Oxford Poets S.
3 total works
This book is the poet's first commercial collection of poems since 1979. It comprises five pamphlets originally published by Peppercanister Press in Dublin. The themes of the poems include violence, love, friendship, family history and the bloody social history of the early 19th century. Kinsella has also edited "The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse" and is sometimes associated with Irish culture in America, where he teaches part-time as Professor of English in Temple University, Philadelphia.
"The Collected Poems" of the distinguished poet Thomas Kinsella contains virtually all his own poems, written over the past 40 years. The early books, of the 1950s and 1960s, include occasional poems, lyrics, and historical and political sequences. Then follow poems of local and family settings, with a growing mythical and allegorical element. Later comes a more public poetry ("Butcher's Dozen", for instance, on the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in 1972.) Thomas Kinsella is also well-known for his translations from Irish literature, such as "The Tain" and he has made a continuing, and often controversial, study of Ireland's dual tradition in English and Irish literature.
This is Thomas Kinsella's first book of poems since 1988, and it collects together the contents of five private publications from his Peppercanister Press in Dublin. Following the poems of family and social history in Blood and Family , the new book continues with a body of personal poetry from the poet's home places in the city. There are two longer poems: the book opens with 'One Fond Embrace' , a private personal accounting, and closes with 'Open Court' , set in one of the crowded literary scences in Dublin's recent past. There are too the first short poems from Kinsella's new home in County Wicklow. This book is intended for poetry market, especially in USA and Ireland (N & S).