Last Poems

By Thomas Kinsella

Last Poems brings together the poems from Thomas Kinsella's five final Peppercanister pamphlets, originally collected as Late Poems (2013), along with a selection of new poems, fragments and revised work which the poet completed before his death in December 2021. An iconic figure in Irish literature, Thomas Kinsella was one of the great poets of the last century: his poems' concern with elemental questions, and a poetics which could be equal to them, is evident here in poems drawn from student publications, in his characteristically meditative sequences and in glittering late fragments. His work was compared to Joyce's by the New York Times for 'its sense of place [and] quest for coherence and meaning in a dark and precarious world': throughout, the poems face up to pressing concerns, age and mortality, the savage waste of war, the opposing ways in which religion and science frame the human predicament, and how the artist may creatively redeem and, in their work, 'offer the Gift onward'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800173361

Thomas Kinsella

Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928. He was educated at University College, Dublin and entered the Irish Civil Service before becoming a full-time writer and teach in the USA. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry and of essays, and editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse.

Book preview

Last Poems

Thomas

Kinsella

CARCANET POETRY

‘Where nature simply made, you understand.’

Michelangelo, Sonnet XI: to Giorgio Vasari

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Marginal Economy (2006)

Wandering alone

First Night

The Affair

Wedding Service

Blood of the Innocent

Marcus Aurelius

Songs of Exile

Marginal Economy

Songs of Understanding

Rhetoric of Natural Beauty

Man of War (2007)

Argument

War

Retrospect

A Proposal

Notes

Belief and Unbelief (2007)

Novice

Delirium

Superfresh

Echo

Art Object

Belief and Unbelief

Fat Master (2011)

Elderly Craftsman at His Bench

Into Thy Hands

The Last Round: an allegory

The Guardians

Summer Evening: City Centre

Reflection

Free Fall

Fat Master

Love Joy Peace (2011)

Reserved Table

Anatomy

Colloquy of the Carnal

Flesh Eater

The Next Part of the Prayer

Tenants in Common

Love Joy Peace

Last Poems

A light tightness

‘And then we watched the trial’

Beauty

Christmas Eve 1950

‘Cold reptile eyes are watching/ In a marble face’

Communism

On ‘Darwin: Origin of Species’ (1860 ed.)

Death in Ilium

Enter Richard, dying (from Downstream)

Fragments – After a Fashion

‘I feel an invisible movement around us’ (or, ‘Terminus’)

Judge of the Supreme Court

‘Luminous in the darkness of the past’

Night Elder

Old

Our Father (2020)

Our Father (2021)

Our Home

Reflection of a Poet

‘Stars ticked uncontrollably down’

Statuesque

Street Game for Adults

Street Noises

The Choice

The Starlit Eye

The Sun

‘We are the marrow in the serpent’s bone’

On Troilus and Cressida

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Thomas Kinsella from Carcanet

Copyright

9

LAST POEMS

14

Marginal Economy

15

Wandering alone

from abandoned room to room

down the corridors of a derelict hotel,

searching for the lost urinal…

I woke,

breathing a mental smell,

and tasted the night facts.

Nightwomen,

picking the works of my days apart,

will you find what you need

in the waste still to come?

16

First Night

The older people in the neighbourhood

knew him and stayed clear.

Before they found themselves

laid hold of again, up against the counter.

Talking in his corner about the early days,

and the way everything went wrong. Refusing to take in

the realities of the past forty years;

the long sentences finding their way

to a legalistic close.

But there was no one else left

who had known all the major figures.

And I had learned to stand near

in case there was something he hadn’t said before.

And sometimes there was someone new starting to listen.

As I was, that first night.

I had moved in

to the flat across the street: a naked room

up under the roof, with a thin bed;

the widows’ voices calling across the landing below.

And taken my first look in the dead moonlight

across the old roofs, back toward the edge of the city,

the new slum I had just left

– her teeth and glasses distinct on the night street.

Our voices unforgiving, exchanging refusals. 17

My brain at the window,

absorbing a new view of the world.

City loneliness.

One footstep down at the corner.

I saw the lights of the bar opposite,

checked I had enough left for a drink

… and was counting out the change, and turning away,

when I felt his presence beside me at the counter

on his high stool, his back against the partition.

After a few remarks, exchanged as though

I had been gone only a