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'.