You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and its commemoration in Derry in January 2022, Carcanet is proud to publish a new edition of Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, with a prologue from the Saville Report, an epilogue from the Prime Minister's House of Commons apology, and a new author's note.
The Táin Bó Cuailnge, centre-piece of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales, is Ireland's greatest epic. It tells the story of a great cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, queen and king of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cuailnge. The hero of the tale is Cuchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, who resists the invaders single-handed while Ulster's warriors lie sick. Thomas Kinsella presents a complete and living version of the story. His translation is based on the partial texts in two medieval manuscripts, with eleme...
In this comprehensive study of Thomas Kinsella's poetry, Brian John explores the poet's development within both the Irish and the English contexts and defines the nature of his poetic achievement. He also offers a new reading of Kinsella's evolving relationship to one of his major literary forebears, W. B. Yeats. What becomes clear is the formidable accomplishment of a poet, now writing at the height of his powers, whose substantial body of work warrants comparison with the grand masters of twentieth-century literature in English - with Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett.
This magnificent anthology presents the Irish tradition as a unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history. The selection begins in pre-Christian times and closes with nineteenth- and twentieth-century verse. Poets featured include Swift, Goldsmith, W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney.
In this work, we are offered an insight as to what inspired him to write these poems and the result is a deeply personal part-memoir, part-poetry collection that will be treasured by readers of Kinsella for years to come. This high-quality hardback volume is filled with beautiful and imaginative photographs of Dublin landmarks such as St. James's Gate, Dublin Castle and the Peppercannister Church. Twenty of his best-loved and memorable poems, including His Father's Hands and St. Catherine's Clock have new commentaries written by Thomas Kinsella. An introduction, also written by him, serves to introduce the reader to his relationship, and that of his family and friends with the city of Dublin.
Traces the history of the Peppercanister Press and illuminates the evolving development of Kinsella's ambitious poetic project. The poems are discussed chronologically and the clear interpretations are accompanied by drawings and reproductions of covers from the original publications.
Irish literature exists in two languages. A dual approach is necessary if the tradition, with its historical, political and semantic tensions, is to be understood-indeed, if some of its features are to be appreciated at all. Separate Gaelic and Anglo-Irish anthologies and commentaries have long been readily available, but commentaries dealing with the total Irish literary response are rare. In The Dual Tradition Thomas Kinsella presents a view of poetry in Ireland from early times to the present day, concentrating on the periods of most radical adjustment and change: the coming of Christianity; Norman and later settlement; the end of the bardic period; colonialism and dispossession; politics before Famine and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He brings Yeats and Joyce into new focus and considers in special detail the poetry of Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh and Samuel Beckett. The translations from the Irish are by the author.
Considered to be one of the most inventive of the contemporary Irish poets, Thomas Kinsella is credited with bringing modernism to Irish verse. Kinsella uses sensitive language to deal with primal aspects of the human experience. His early writing, "Poems" (1956) and "Another September" (1958) established him as a new voice in Irish poetry. The peak of Kinsella's success came with the founding of the Peppercanister Press and the publication of "Butcher's Dozen" in 1972.Despite such early successes, however, Kinsella seems to have faded into the background of the Irish poetic stage. In "The Sea of Disappointment", Andrew Fitzsimons offers us a chronological journey through the structural and ...