Brendan Kennelly

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 a variety of recordings made over the years. The Essential Brendan Kennelly has been edited by two lifelong admirers of his work. Like Kennelly, Terence Brown studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he taught until 2009; he is now Fellow Emeritus of the college. Michael Longley, who also studied at Trinity College, went on to become one of Ireland's leading poets and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007-10. Terence Brown & Michael Longley write (from their foreword): '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".'

Selected Poems

The Essential Brendan Kennelly

The novel is based on Jail Journal, the work of the nineteenth century Irish patriot John Mitchell.

The Florentines

Brendan Kennelly has chosen poems that give him a thrill or a laugh, poems that sing clouds or sunlight into his heart, poems that he is glad to read again and again for a whole host of reasons. The collection begins with Patrick Kavanagh's 'Innocence' and ends with his 'Peace'. Between these two lie Kennelly's own selection of the best of Irish poetry, from the grand masters Jonathan Swift and Thomas Moore to the great lyricists of the twentieth century, Yeats, Synge and MacNiece. The contemporary voices of Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley and, of course, Seamus Heaney, are also heard. They're all here: sad poems, mad poems, funny poems, lonely poems, poems that demonstrate and celebrate the partitioned culture of Ireland, poems by and about women, poems that tell lies beautifully and truths clumsily, poems that sing the pains and joys of history, that tell of spiritual desolation, physical desire, remorse, love, myth, exile, homesickness, hatred, dreams, prejudice, nightmares, superstition, illness, health, war, religion, disaster and death. And all, all between innocence and peace.

Favourite Poems of Ireland

Between Innocence and Peace

The author's own selection from over 20 of his poetry books written over five decades, replacing his earlier selections, A Time for Voices; Breathing Spaces; and Begin, and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems.

New & Selected Poems, 1960-2004

Familiar Strangers

Neil Astley

The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me is the ultimate reader's companion to poetry: a selection of 100 classic poems from ﬁve centuries with lively "companion" commentaries to go with and illuminate each poem. The heavy bear can be many things which go with the bearer: another self or alter ego, the burden of poetry or art, what weighs us down and makes us do what we don't really want to do as well as what pulls us back to our selves, the animal side which makes us bearable or human. The editors' selection ranges from Wyatt, Ralegh and Shakespeare in the 16th century, to Donne, Milton and Marvell in the 17th, to Swift, Pope and Johnson in the 18th. It embraces the Romantic visions of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, as well as the later, darker outlook of Browning, Tennyson and Hardy, and seeks enlightenment in the shadowlands of Emily Dickinson, Wilde and Yeats. As well as journeying with the reader through some of the greatest poems in the English language, The Heavy Bear encounters many modern poets, not least Delmore Schwartz, whose sense of conﬂict between self and society gave birth to this anthology's title-poem, 'The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me'. Others include some of the major figures in Irish poetry Brendan Kennelly has known personally as well as written about, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland. The poems keep each other company in this highly original compilation, questioning each other in a continuing thematic, imagistic debate which the editors seek to explore in their responses, trying at all times to deﬁne their sense and vision of poetry as disturbing, questioning, enlightening companionship for the reader. Both editors are renowned communicators of poetry: Brendan Kennelly as one of Ireland's best-loved poets, as Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and as a popular cultural commentator on Irish television; Neil Astley as founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and editor of the Staying Alive anthology series. This long awaited anthology is published on 17th April 2021 in celebration of Brendan Kennelly's 85th birthday.

The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

Brendan Kennelly's Book of Judas, a 400-page epic poem in twelve parts, became the number one bestselling book in Ireland. As well as receiving rapturous reviews, Brendan Kennelly won the Sunday Independent/Irish Life Award for the book and earned the ultimate accolade of 'Kerryman of the Year'. Not merely lost but irredeemable, Kennelly's bitterly articulate Judas speaks, dreams and murmurs - of past and present, history and myth, good and evil, of men, women and children, and of course money - until we realise that the unspeakable perpetrator of the apparently unthinkable, in penetrating the icy reaches of his own world, becomes a sly, many-voiced critic of ours. The full-sized Book of Judas is no longer available, usurped by The Little Book of Judas, a distillation of that literary monster, purged to its traitorous essence.

A Poem

The Book of Judas

The Essential Brendan Kennelly is at turns a lush and jubilant, wintry and harsh collection of poems. It provides a convincing outline of the poet s growth from an early lyric genius who was sensitive to discordance into the epic poet who, as the editors observe, combined the note of awe-struck lyricism with notes of disgust, fierce satire, sardonic bitterness and self-laceration. As Kennelly himself explains in The Book of Judas, The best way to serve the age is to betray it. This satire has since given way to poems that are comic, desolate, absurd by turns. Here is the work of a poet of abundance, including just over a hundred of his most essential poems, selected by Terence Brown and Michael Longley. Edited and with an Introduction by Terence Browne and Michael Longley; Includes an audio CD of the poet reading his work"

Euripides

Brendan Kennelly has turned this classic tale of betrayal and vengeance into a text for our times. The sorceress Medea marries Jason after helping him and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece. When Jason deserts her, she punishes her faithless husband by murdering their two sons, after killing his young bride and her father with a robe of ﬁre. Medea carries out her bloody revenge in the name of Justice, but in the spirit of rage. The rage of many modern women, including Irishwomen, electriﬁes this highly charged and deeply personal play. First staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival, Kennelly's chilling new version of Euripides' great tragedy has delighted and devastated audiences in Ireland, Britain and America. This edition is now out of print but is reprinted in Kennelly's Greek plays trilogy, When Then Is Now.

Euripides' Medea

When Then is Now brings together Brendan Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies: Antigone by Sophocles and Euripides' Medea and The Trojan Women. All three plays dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes. In his preface, Brendan Kennelly describes how writing these three plays helped him enormously at difficult times in his own life. When Then is Now gives living testament of his belief that 'listening to ancient voices can help us confront, understand and express many problems of today'.

Three Greek Tragedies

When Then is Now

(Bodas de Sangre) ; a new version

Federico García Lorca, Blood wedding

Federico García Lorca

Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca is a classic of Spanish literature, the tragedy of a woman loved by two men. The man she has loved since childhood is hot-blooded Leonardo, but his family are hated by her own folk, and he marries someone else. Then, on her wedding-night, Leonardo carries her off on horseback, pursued by the men of the two shamed families. The two rivals meet in the moonlight in a fight to the death... Lorca said the only hope for happiness lies in 'living one's instinctual life to the full'. And: 'To burn with desire and to remain silent is the greatest punishment we can inflict on ourselves.' Blood Wedding explores the tragic intensity of lived, instinctual passion. For Brendan Kennelly, this involves a return to the very origins of drama: 'The pure pulsing sense of the mysterious nature of life before we learn to explain things almost out of existence ... Blood Wedding is a drama of agonised and bewildering revelation.' Lorca has a searing realisation of the power of desire. Brendan Kennelly rises to the challenge of how to convey this in an English translation. In language at once soaring and accurate, wild and precise, he does justice to Lorca's tragic vision of the nature and consequences of lived desire. His version of Blood Wedding reveals the mysterious, intricate, passionate and truly astonishing nature of Lorca's masterpiece.

Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre)

Sophocles

After the death of Oedipus, his sons turn on each other. When both are killed, the inflexible Creon becomes King of Thebes. While the loyal Eteocles is buried with due honour, Creon orders that the body of his rebellious brother Polyneices should be left to rot. But his sister Antigone refuses to let this happen. Sophocles' great play dramatises the resulting conﬂict, a battle of wills which leads to inevitable tragedy.Antigone was a set text on the new Leaving Certiﬁcate syllabus in Ireland. This edition includes short essays by Brendan Kennelly, Terence Brown and Kathleen McCracken. This edition is now out of print but it is included in full in When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies.

A New Version

Sophocles' Antigone

Kennelly followed his shocking epic poem Cromwell with the even more notorious Book of Judas, which topped the Irish bestsellers list. This new piece of mischief out-Judases Cromwell, sinking its teeth into the pants of poetry itself. Here, the author plays devil's advocate, exploring the 'poetryworlds' of one Ace de Horner who is slowly going blind. Helped by his uglyjoe dog, Kanooce, and by a woman, Janey Mary, Ace thinks he is connecting the fragments of his life a little more convincingly. Not so! As the poem digs into Ace's vanity, visions, fantasies, failures, dedication and absurdity, the reader is aware of Ace's frustration in his efforts to relate to poetry, to his jocular distortions of language and to his pained perspective on the world.

Poetry My Arse

"Brendan Kennelly's new version...is probably the most substantial Irish drama since W. B. Yeats was writing ....This is, of course, A political tragedy. Antigone, In deciding to bury her disgraced dead brother, Is playing true to the laws of the god

Follows the fates of Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra and the other women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and their remaining families about to be taken away as slaves (it runs parallel to the events in Euripides' play "Hecuba") It is often considered one of Euripides' greatest works, and among the best anti-war plays ever written.

Euripides' The Trojan Women

Though we live in a world that dreams of endingthat always seems about to give insomething that will not acknowledge conclusioninsists that we forever begin.So ends Brendan Kennelly's poignant cry for renewal, 'Begin', the seed of this new collection of echoing poems. Kennelly has listened to the voices of poems written over forty years to assemble a living testament to the redeeming power of poetry, making connections across time in his work and with the world, setting up reverberations 'where there was only the consolation of ordinary emptiness'. As in Cromwell and The Book of Judas, those voices include some we might not think we want to hear, from the likeable bus driver who'd been a Black-and-Tan to the man-mirroring evil of the man-obliterating bomb.In poems about ignorance and learning, the good and the bad, men and women, the Dubliners he's known and the country people he grew up with, politicians and killers with causes, Kennelly hears echoes of violence, childhood, love, history, hurt and laughter, but with recurring hints of some hope in self-renewal - and with each poem setting off echoes of further echoes.Like all writers who take risks with life and language, he returns obsessively to saints and sinners, mad-ness and appearances, desolation and decency. For Brendan Kennelly, a lifelong teacher, echoes are a kind of education: 'Education is as much a matter of crafty concealment and manipulation as it is of stylish accent and sophisticated expression. It's amazing the way ignorance, hatred and prejudice endure and thrive under the educated skin. So much civilised living is an educated skin. We should be careful how and where we scratch.'

Brendan Kennelly

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