This is the first comprehensive study of the works of one of lreland's most significant contemporary poets. Thomas Kinsella, who first became well known in Ireland in the 1950s, now ranks among the most important of his generation of Irish poets. Although he is considered by many to be the most serious and the most experimental of the contemporary Irish poets, his work has received little critical attention.

Kinsella is often credited with bringing the techniques of international modernism to Irish verse. Jackson presents a rounded critique of the later poems, whose art engages, analyses and morally restructures the content of the poet's world. What emerges from The Whole Matter is a picture of Kinsella's astonishingly far-reaching evolution, culminating in an art deeply engaged with the culture around it and with the entire human predicament.