Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland's most popular and prolific poets. Over the past five decades he has written thousands of poems published in over 30 books of poetry, including three previous editions of Selected Poems. Published on his 75th birthday, this new selection presents just over a hundred of Kennelly's most essential poems, accompanied by an audio CD of his own readings drawn from two classic recordings made in Dublin in 1982 and 1999. The Essential Brendan Kennelly has been edited by two lifelong admirers of his work. Like Kennelly, Terence Brown, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and taught there for most of life. After studying at Trinity College, Michael Longley went on to become one of Ireland's leading poets and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007-10.
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'Brendan Kennelly is a poet of rare gifts, who at all stages of his career has written distinctive, memorable and powerful poems. We hope that this selection will allow readers to appreciate anew, or for the first time, a body of work that ranges from tender lyricism to the bleakest despair at the human condition, from bawdily comic narrative to the pleasingly epigrammatic squib, from mythic consciousness to social satire... Yet each literary mode - the lyrical and its obverse, a reductively satirirc assault on "the poetic" - shares what has seemed the basis of all of Kennelly's poetry: a quest for authenticity of emotion undertaken with high moral intent. In each, as Beckett said of the painter Jack Yeats, the poet "stakes his being".' - --Terence Brown & Michael Longley
'With considerable honesty and bravery Kennelly enters and becomes others in order to perceive, understand and suffer… always moving, probing and doubting, never willing or able to settle on any one certainty…There is clash and conflict, cruelty and irony, sardonic wit, passion' - --Aidan Murphy, Sunday Press (Dublin)
'He is the people's poet. He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently. He also asks impossible questions and suggests unthinkable answers about the things that really matter. And he refuses to be precious or out of touch with the rest of us...a serious contribution to the nation's mental and spiritual well-being' - --Jim Farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
'With considerable honesty and bravery Kennelly enters and becomes others in order to perceive, understand and suffer… always moving, probing and doubting, never willing or able to settle on any one certainty…There is clash and conflict, cruelty and irony, sardonic wit, passion' - --Aidan Murphy, Sunday Press (Dublin)
'He is the people's poet. He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently. He also asks impossible questions and suggests unthinkable answers about the things that really matter. And he refuses to be precious or out of touch with the rest of us...a serious contribution to the nation's mental and spiritual well-being' - --Jim Farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
About the Author
Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland's most distinguished and best loved poets, as well as a dramatist, critic, renowned teacher and cultural commentator. Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, he was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for over 30 years. He has published over 30 poetry and drama titles, including Cromwell, Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004, Glimpses, The Man Made of Rain, Martial Art, Now, Poetry My Arse, Reservoir Voices, When Then Is Now and The Book of Judas (which topped the Irish bestsellers list). All these are available separately from Bloodaxe, the latter shortened to The Little Book of Judas.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Classic Kennelly
20 Dec 2012
By AnnH
- Published on Amazon.com
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Kennelly's down-to-earth, yet beautiful use of language to elucidate moments of clarity in life in this book can be summed up in his own words: "Poetry is an attempt to cut through the effects of deadening familiarity and repeated, mechanical usage in order to unleash that profound vitality, to reveal that inner sparkle. In the beginning was the Word. In the end will be the Word...language is a human miracle always in danger of drowning in a sea of familiarity."
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