Collected Poems ― 1956-2001

Thomas Kinsella is one of the most indispensable poets writing in the English language, and this collection is the pinnacle and summary of an exceptional career. From the landscapes and early formalism of Another September (1958), the psychological investigations of Downstream (1962), the toughened metrics and paradoxical faith of Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968), to the balanced relationships of New Poems (1973), Kinsella has produced an epic body of work with unusual range and skill. The themes and forms of the early to middle period deepened into the creative myths that were collected in volumes such as One (1974), Songs of the Psyche (1985), Out of Ireland (1987), and Poems from Centre City (1990). The ensuing volumes continue the search for naked proof of human dignity, as Kinsella has always done, but now they confront mutability, death, and the increasing chaos of twenty-first-century experience.

Thomas Kinsella was born on May 4, 1928 in Inchicore, Dublin, and graduated from University College Dublin. He subsequently took a position in the Civil Service. Considered to be the most experimental of the contemporary Irish poets, Kinsella is credited with bringing the techniques of international modernism to Irish verse. He published his first collection, The Starlight Eye (1952), with Dolmen Press, helping to set the type himself. He has also translated extensively from Irish, most notably the Old Irish epic An Tain Bo Cuailgne, published as An Tain (1969) and An Duanaire?Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). In 1972, he founded the Peppercanister Press to publish Butcher’s Dozen, a pamphlet poem written in response to the British government’s findings on Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday events. Thomas Kinsella’s many volumes of poetry include Poems (1956), Another September (1958), Downstream (1962), Butcher’s Dozen (1972), Fifteen Dead (1979), The Good Fight (1973), Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968), Notes from the Dead and Other Poems (1973), One and Other Poems (1979), Peppercanister Poems 1972?1978 (1979), St Catherine’s Clock (1987), Poems From City Centre (1990), and Madonna and Other Poems (1991). In 1986 he edited The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. Wake Forest published his Collected Poems in 2006, and a Selected Poems in September 2010. His awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award (1966, 1969, 1992). He taught in the US for many years and initiated and administered the Irish Tradition study program in Dublin until 1992. He long lived in County Wicklow, Ireland, but currently lives in Philadelphia.