Wake Forest University Press

Irish Poetry

Thomas Kinsella - Peppercanister Poems (1972-1978) paperback

"In order to understand it [Kinsella's work] one must enter that particular world.  A few pointers only can be given: the Dantesque strength and vitality of the darker visions; the Joycean ability to see and present the commonplace in a vivid and somehow transfiguring fashion; the capacity to move easily from simplicity to rhetoric, from high to the low manner; the extraordinary movements from grossness and grotesquery to lucid elegance; the deep, never failing compassion that is matched by a steadily clinical gaze that seems sometimes almost brutal." - Robin Skelton, The Malahat Review

"We don't just overhear Kinsella; we watch him ritualize a process of radical understanding and remaking... Kinsella is a serious poet of invention and honesty." - John D. Engle, Parnassus

"It makes for an exciting book, new, "a pearl in muck / glimpsed only as the muck settles," emerging from a fertile and vigorous imagination." - Floyd Skloot, Eire-Ireland

"Kinsella's poems are direct, immediate, colloquial as park-bench speech and, suddenly, moving." - Richard Tobias, University of Pittsburgh

$9.95
1979   159 pages
paperback
978-0-916390-12-9