Selected by Thomas Kinsella, a renowned poet and translator, this anthology presents the Irish tradition as unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history.
As the most wide-ranging anthology available—spanning from the pre-Christian era to the present day, the poems are grouped in three sections. Kinsella's first selections are from the earliest pre-Christian times and move forward to the first poetry in English from the 14th century. Next comes Irish bardic poetry and English poetry in the era of Swift and Goldsmith. The final section brings us to the recent past and the present with 19th- and 20th-century poets from Davis, Mangan, Yeats, and Ferguson to Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney.