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Prose Occasions

1951-2006

Thomas Kinsella

Edited by Andrew Fitzsimons

Prose Occasions by Thomas Kinsella
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, Irish
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (320 pages)
(Pub. Feb 2009)
9781847770080
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • '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 In a previously unpublished address given at the University of Turin in 2006, Kinsella surveys his entire career, and the culture - Irish and European - which he has inherited.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.
    Thomas Kinsella
    Thomas Kinsella  (1928-2021) was born in Dublin in 1928. He was educated at University College, Dublin and entered the Irish Civil Service before becoming a full-time writer and teach in the USA. He was the author of over thirty books of poetry and of essays, and editor of The New Oxford ... read more
    Andrew Fitzsimons
    Andrew Fitzsimons was educated at Trinity College Dublin, and is an Associate Professor at Gakushuin University, Tokyo. As well as essays on Irish poetry, he has published on Beckett and Shakespeare, and contemporary British poetry, and translated from Italian poets, including Eugenio Montale and Andrea Zanzotto. His study of Thomas Kinsella, ... read more
    Awards won by Thomas Kinsella Commended, 2007 Poetry Book Society
    (Selected Poems)
    Praise for Thomas Kinsella 'These are not poems to be read swiftly, relished once and set aside. They are often, for all their music, discomforting. Their uncertainties, questionings and images lure the reader to wonder and return.'
    Kathleen Bell, Everybody's Reviewing
    'Kinsella's lines are beautifully wrought, the stanzas gently rhymed, and the poet, in masterful style, at once delivers and undercuts the 'rhetoric' of beauty and consolation.'
    Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

    '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
     '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
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