Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricism to political satire and social commentary. This representative selection of the poetry he has published from 1956 to 2006 invites readers to explore the range of his poetic world.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and its commemoration in Derry in January 2022, Carcanet proudly publish a new edition of Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, with a prologue from the Saville Report, an epilogue from the Prime Minister's House of Commons apology, and a new author's note.

The Táin Bó Cuailnge, centre-piece of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales, is Ireland's greatest epic. It tells the story of a giant cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, queen and king of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cuailnge. Thomas Kinsella's translation is the first attempt to present a 'living version' of the story, complete and unbowdlerized. It is based on the partial texts in two medieval manuscripts, and includes a group of related stories which prepare for the action of the Táin. There are 31 brush drawings by Louis le Brocquy, and three maps.

Honouring the Word is a tribute book compiled to mark the 80th birthday of poet Maurice Harmon. In addition to being a poet, Maurice Harmon is the leading scholar-critic of his generation in the field of Anglo-Irish Literature. He pioneered its development as an academic discipline and is the author of a number of significant works, from bibliographical guides to headline studies of Sean O Faolain, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, and others.

Thomas Kinsella stands apart in modern Irish poetry. His work, employing traditional and modernist elements in individual poems and open sequences, deals in a range of subjects from the most intense and psychic privacy to political satire and social commentary, from love and the enabling feminine to metaphysical speculation in a variety of earthly settings. Kinsella is a city poet. Born in Dublin in 1928, he attended University College, and entered the Irish Civil Service, but resigned from the Department of Finance in 1965 for a career in poetry in the United States. He published from the beginning with the Dolmen Press, later co-publishing his poetry and translations with Oxford University Press. His translations from the Irish include the Iron-Age prose epic "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed: 1600-1900". He is editor of the "New Oxford Book of Irish Verse".

This magnificent anthology presents the Irish tradition as a unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history. The selection begins in pre-Christian times and closes with nineteenth- and twentieth-century verse. Poets featured include Swift, Goldsmith, W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney.

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'.