Late Poems

Kinsella Thomas

This book collects the poems of Thomas Kinsella from his five most recent Peppercanister pamphlets. As he has throughout his writing, here Kinsella sets himself, clear-eyed, to face hard truths: "the waste and the excess" of the living process; ageing and emptiness; the cancer of war. But against these are the creatively redeeming impulses – of the search for understanding: "an imagination arguing with itself / until the ache is eased"; above all, of "Grace as desire... Joy of the flesh / Saying all it can of love".

Reviews

"With unique memorability and force these poems, in the words of 'Belief and Unbelief', coax us to follow their author in search of understanding 'back to the dark / and the depths that I came from'. No one who cares about poetry should hesitate to embark on the journey" – The Guardian

"The most complex and multi-layered of the Peppercanister poems... taken with the 1968 and 1973 volumes and some of the earlier poems may comprise the most challenging, most achieved, and therefore most rewarding body of poetry from the British Isles over the past half-century" – The Cambridge History of Irish Literature

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