Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark: Essays on Thomas Kinsella

$29.95

Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark establishes a broad interdisciplinary context in which to consider the work of Thomas Kinsella, one of the most significant poets in modern Irish and international poetry. Not only is Kinsella’s remarkable poetic corpus the subject of several essays, his critical writings and achievements as a translator and anthologist of Gaelic literature are also considered, in particular his groundbreaking translation of the Irish vernacular epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, published to great critical acclaim by the Dolmen Press in 1969.

This collection of twelve essays by some of the finest poets and scholars of contemporary Irish poetry provides a detailed reading of the themes and forms throughout Kinsella’s remarkable career. Beginning with several chapters devoted to assessing the aesthetic importance of Kinsella’s native Dublin, this volume traces the evolution of the poet’s work from the early formalism of the 1950s through the Jungian-inspired explorations of the psyche, his fascination with personal origins and Irish mythology, and the open-ended sequences that characterized his mature poetry. The central role of Kinsella’s Peppercanister Press from both a creative and artistic perspective is also explored, as is the fundamental importance of Kinsella’s wife Eleanor, his partner and Muse for more than sixty years.

Edited by Adrienne Leavy.

Essays by Brian Caraher, Lucy Collins, Alex Davis, Gerald Dawe, Andrew Fitzsimons, Paul Gosling, Hugh Haughton, Adrienne Leavy, Mary O’Malley, Thomas Dillon Redshaw, Gerard Smyth, and Derval Tubridy.

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Praise

“Thomas Kinsella is without a doubt, after Joyce, the most important literary artist to emerge from Catholic Ireland. His work is one of our small culture’s crowning achievements, and the scholar Adrienne Leavy has assembled in this collection of essays a group of the most brilliant Irish poets and scholars to prove the point… This is a powerful set of essays, and its publication is a timely salute from afar by Kinsella’s long-time American publisher, Wake Forest.” —Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Times

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