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“... a strong line over questions of definition and evaluation; and each contains much to applaud. Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant past, while the Faber book ...”

“... a recreation of the Christmas fraternisation between British and German troops in 1914. Thomas Kinsella is the kind of poet you either can or can’t take. He is very strong meat. After an auspicious start, those with a weakness for lyric grace and purity of diction will be reaching for the sick-bag. His career has described a conscientious ...”

“... says a voice in Finnegans Wake, managing to lament the issue in something other than English. Thomas Kinsella announces here that ‘there is a sense that it is up to us together to overcome the old dividing idiocies and employ our energies directly, as best we can, on the actual material of the vital inheritance that unites us and divides us.’ The ...”

“... 1600-1800, introduced by Alan Harrison, is probably more familiar to non-Gaelic readers through Kinsella and O’Tuama’s major bilingual anthology, An Duanaire (1981). The Field Day publicity makes the claim that ‘all texts not originally in English have been specially translated for this work.’ That is untrue. There are the familiar translations by ...”

“... regrettable, but beyond that, seven of the ten poets are published by Faber, the outsiders being Thomas Kinsella, the unignorable Geoffrey Hill and the successful Craig Raine: in the world of literary publishing, such matters have some importance. Two of the pieces were published in Quarto, until recently edited by Raine himself. Raine’s name crops up ...”

“... in An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed (Dolmen Press, 1981) by Sean O’Tuama and translated by Thomas Kinsella: there, more clearly than anywhere else, we can see what an Irish tradition means by marking its loss. Seamus Deane comes close to this sense of it when he explains that ‘the Irish idea of tradition was naturally more inclined toward the ...”

“... time he is making a notable contribution to English poetic style, and it is unfortunate that D.M. Thomas’s shoddy translations of Pushkin and Akhmatova should have received more attention. Leopold Staff, who died in 1957, was one of the founding fathers of modern Polish literature and his sophisticated simplicity won the admiration of Milosz, Rozewicz and ...”

“... as ‘great poetry’. Ireland has lately produced almost a glut of distinguished poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Longley. Yet their audience is relatively small. What’s different about Heaney? Fennell has several answers extraneous to poetry, but he ends up highlighting the academic agendas satisfied by ...”

“... for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for example, he faked an excellent version of Thomas Chatterton’s (already fake) mode. Another poem in his ambit is probably Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl (1985), a dream-allegorical confrontation in which malign powers are named with outlandish blazons such as ‘Zandra’, ‘Saatchi’ and ...”

“... the wars between Connaught and Ulster, translated by Lady Gregory in 1902 and decades later by Thomas Kinsella, which became an Iliad for independent Ireland. It is given a place of honour at the start of The Field Day Anthology. As a vision of the four green fields, however, it is divisive and gory. Was ...”