In this delightful anthology, Thomas Kinsella, a renowned poet and translator, offers new translations of a significant selection of poems from the early centuries to the present day, thus revealing some of the greatest riches of Irish verse. No one has displayed the Irish tradition--which includes the earliest vernacular poetry in Western Europe--to better advantage than Kinsella has in this magnificent collection.Divided into three "Books," Book I opens with the earliest, pre-Christian poetry in Old Irish and ends in the fourteenth century with the first Irish poetry in the English language. Book II, ranging from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, presents the age of bardic poetry and the great poetry of its decline, the "new" poetry in Irish that followed it, and the era of Swift and Goldsmith. Book III covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the beggar-poet Raifteiri in Irish and his English-language contemporary Thomas Moore, to the work of a number of poets born around the time of Yeats' death.