'Literatures are complex and living things; they have personalities...'
- Thomas Kinsella, 'The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry'

Prose Occasions gathers over half a century's critical writing by the poet Thomas Kinsella. It makes available for the first time in a single volume key works including 'The Divided Mind', his influential discussion of Anglo-Irish poetry, writings on the Gaelic poetic tradition, considerations of Yeats, Pound, Austin Clarke, Louis le Brocquy and Sean O Riada. Prose Occasions also extends our understanding of Kinsella's own work: 'Myth and Reality', 'Translations from the Irish', and 'Literature and Politics in Ireland' consider personal and public themes. One section is devoted to Kinsella as reviewer: his telling assessments of Auden, William Empson, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, and Marianne Moore are examples of creative analysis. In a previously unpublished address given at the University of Turin in 2006, Kinsella surveys his entire career, and the culture - Irish and European - which he has inherited. Prose Occasions spans a lifetime's engagement with the enriching possibilities of literature.