Thomas Kinsella
Poem of the Week: “Leaf-Eater” by Thomas Kinsella
Though the titular kenning seems to promise a grand or heroic subject, Thomas Kinsella’s “Leaf-Eater” instead examines the inhabitant of a single leaf in the heart of a garden. Readers’ attention is directed to the minute form of a hungry grub, caught lucklessly searching around itself in “blind space” until it is compelled to “eat…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “O Rome” by Thomas Kinsella
O Rome thou art, at coffee break, O Rome
Thou also art a town of staring clerks,
Staring the azure window at mid-morning,
Commemorating something in a daze.
Poem of the Week: “The Design” by Thomas Kinsella
Goodness is required.
It is part of the design.
Badness is understood.
It is a lapse, and part of the design.
Poem of the Week: “Girl on a Swing” by Thomas Kinsella
The sensation of swinging is that of both freedom and dependency; as you fall through the air, you can feel excited and terrified at once. Like a swing, this sweet little poem shifts, connecting us to the feelings of “panic and delight” that Kinsella so gracefully describes. Girl on a Swing My touch has little force: Her infant body…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Endymion” by Thomas Kinsella
As we get ready to celebrate Halloween, let’s take a moment to think about where the most frightful holiday of the year comes from—Samhain (pronounced SOW-in). Samhain is a traditional Celtic celebration to remind people that the year is about to get darker, and that harvest season is over: Winter is here! It’s also a…
Continue ReadingCelebrating the music of the past with the words of the present
Sculpture of Seán Ó Riada in Cúil Aodha, Ireland As we look forward to Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of the Harvest season and the beginning of the “darker” winter months, we are quick to draw connections to our Western ideas of Halloween: spooky costumes, creepy decorations, grim horror stories, and a crisp fall…
Continue ReadingIt Runs In the Family
It’s rare enough to have one famous artist in the family, rarer still to have two. The parents of Thomas and John Kinsella – lauded Irish poet and composer, respectively – must have been doing something right. The Kinsella boys, who grew up in the Dublin suburb of Inchicore to a family employed in the…
Continue ReadingInterns’ Corner: So Many New Reviews!!
Here at the press, we’re really ecstatic about the multitude of reviews our poets have been featured in recently. As if Harry Clifton’s review of last week’s featured poet, Thomas Kinsella, wasn’t coincidental enough, this afternoon, we received our issue Boston College’s Irish Literary Supplement and found a few more surprises. Not only did the supplement include a new review of…
Continue ReadingA Lil’ Bit of Lit Crit.: Harry Clifton on Thomas Kinsella
This weekend, some of you may have seen that our very own Harry Clifton wrote a review on yet another one of our poets, Thomas Kinsella, for this Saturday’s Irish Times! In the review, Clifton writes that in the later work of poets, “we find a flattening out of the poetic line, a casualness that can…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Artists’ Letters” by Thomas Kinsella
While you’ve probably heard enough about love for this week, today, The Press has one more poem we’d like to share with you. This poem is bit of a throwback for us. It’s from our 1986 reprint of Thomas Kinsella’s Peppercanister Poems: 1972–1978, and it is dedicated to our truest love, the written word.
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