Last Poems

Last Poems brings together the poems from Thomas Kinsella's five final Peppercanister pamphlets, originally collected as Late Poems (2013), along with a selection of new poems, fragments and revised work which the poet completed before his death in December 2021. An iconic figure in Irish literature, Thomas Kinsella was one of the great poets of the last century: his poems' concern with elemental questions, and a poetics which could be equal to them, is evident here in poems drawn from student publications, in his characteristically meditative sequences and in glittering late fragments. His work was compared to Joyce's by the New York Times for 'its sense of place [and] quest for coherence and meaning in a dark and precarious world': throughout, the poems face up to pressing concerns, age and mortality, the savage waste of war, the opposing ways in which religion and science frame the human predicament, and how the artist may creatively redeem and, in their work, 'offer the Gift onward'.

Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928. He attended University College Dublin, entering the Civil Service before becoming a full-time writer and teacher in the United States. He was the author of over thirty collections of poetry, and translated extensively from the Irish, notably the great epic The Táin. He was a director of the Dolmen Press and Cuala Press, Dublin, and in 1972 founded Peppercanister Press for the publication of sequences and long and occasional poems. The editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse and of Austin Clarke's Selected Poems and Collected Poems, Thomas Kinsella was also the author of The Dual Tradition (Carcanet), a critical essay on poetry and politics in Ireland. His awards and honours included Guggenheim Fellowships, the Denis Devlin Memorial Award, the Irish Arts Council Triennial Book Award and honorary doctorates from the University of Turin and the National University of Ireland. In 2007 Thomas Kinsella was awarded the Freedom of the City of Dublin. He died in December 2021.