The New Oxford Book of Irish VerseThomas Kinsella Never have the immense riches of Irish poetry been displayed to better advantage in this magnificent new collection. The Irish poetic tradition is generally not considered in its entirety. For the poetry in Irish, especially in the early and medieval periods, the emphasis is frequently specialist or linguistic, while the poetry in English is usually considered as an adjunct to the English tradition. Thomas Kinsella's new anthology views the tradition as a whole, with two major bodies of poetry in interaction--sharing, for a great part of their existence, a very painful history. The selection is divided into three "Books." Book I opens with the earliest, pre-Christian poetry in Old Irish and ends in the fourteenth century with the first Irish poetry in the English language. Book II, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, presents the age of bardic poetry, and the great poetry of its decline, with the "new" poetry in Irish that followed it, and the era of Swift and Goldsmith. Book III covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the beggar poet Raifteiri, in Irish, and his contemporary, Thomas Moore, to the work of a number of poets born about the time of Yeats's death. A feature of the anthology is the body of new translations by Thomas Kinsella. Versions have been used, where appropriate, from his 1981 publication, Poems of the Dispossessed: 1600-1900 (with The Midnight Court now completed) but new versions have been made for all other parts of the work. These amount to a significant new selection: of the early poetry (with some poems from the Latin), of four centuries of bardic poetry, and of a nubmer of modern poems. About the Editor: Thomas Kinsella, poet and translator, divides his time between Dublin and Philadelphia, where he is Professor of English at Temple University. Among his publications are the Tain (1969), Poems 1956-1973, Peppercanister Poems 1972-1978, An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed 1600-1900, and Songs of the Psyche and Her Vertical Smile (1985). Features: A magnificent new collection of Irish verse that treats the tradition as a unified whole . Spans the body of poetry from the pre-Christian era to the present . Contains new translations of much verse originally written in Irish" |
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Page 104
... hundred : and the crowd Carolled and sung aloud ; And the wainwrights , they came too— They were only thirty - two ; A single banner went before , Which a fish and platter bore . On Friday came the porters then , Three hundred fifty ...
... hundred : and the crowd Carolled and sung aloud ; And the wainwrights , they came too— They were only thirty - two ; A single banner went before , Which a fish and platter bore . On Friday came the porters then , Three hundred fifty ...
Page 175
... hundred cows - five hundred horses ! - I would choose yourself above all you might bring of treasure . I had travelled , and hard the journey , through every province , but her parents refused my hand , though fine and open . The ...
... hundred cows - five hundred horses ! - I would choose yourself above all you might bring of treasure . I had travelled , and hard the journey , through every province , but her parents refused my hand , though fine and open . The ...
Page 184
... hundred heads broke , An hundred struck lame . You churl , I'll maintain My father built Lusk , The castle of Slane , And Carrickdrumrusk : The Earl of Kildare , And Moynalta , his brother , As great as they are , I was nurs'd by their ...
... hundred heads broke , An hundred struck lame . You churl , I'll maintain My father built Lusk , The castle of Slane , And Carrickdrumrusk : The Earl of Kildare , And Moynalta , his brother , As great as they are , I was nurs'd by their ...
Contents
TO THE SIXTH CENTURY | 3 |
From the Latin | 9 |
BLÁTHMAC MAC CON BRETTAN | 15 |
Copyright | |
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