Poetry: Half a lifetime ago, in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970), Brendan Kennelly commented: "If I had to generalise about all Irish poetry and say what single quality strikes me most from 'The Deer's Cry', attributed to St Patrick, to 'The Great Hunger', by Patrick Kavanagh, I would say that a hard, simple, virile, rhetorical clarity is its most memorable characteristic".
Replace the word "hard" with "irreverent", nudge the adjective "rhetorical" in the direction of "colloquial", and you have a fair approximation of the single quality that strikes one most in any generalisation of Kennelly's own 40-year oeuvre.
The 500-page Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 is testimony to the prolific output of this perennially popular poet. Collections such as Cromwell (1983), The Book of Judas (1991) and Poetry My Arse (1995) have frequently topped the bestseller lists, while his public readings invariably draw enthusiastic audiences. His native Ballylongford even hosts an annual Brendan Kennelly poetry festival. This popularity notwithstanding, in critical surveys of contemporary Irish poetry, Kennelly's contribution is more often honoured in the breach than the observance. He figures not at all in either Robert Garratt's Modern Irish Poetry (1989) or Neil Corcoran's Poets of Modern Ireland (1999), and merits but a single passing mention in Dillon Johnston's 300-page study, Irish Poetry After Joyce (1997).
One gets the impression that Kennelly is not too bothered by this sort of critical neglect. In a 1990 interview with Richard Pine, published in The Irish Literary Supplement, the poet suggests that "the flaws in my writing, which are considerable, have to do with spontaneity", while a more recent interview with Arminta Wallace in The Irish Times (Saturday May 22nd) posits the idea of poetry as a form of gossip. Neither comment sits well with a critical orthodoxy that puts a premium on the highly crafted and allusive, often at the expense of intelligibility. Kennelly instead positions himself as something of a court-jester at the banquet, and it is characteristic that the central consciousness of his Cromwell sequence should bear the name of Buffún. As with Lear's Fool, however, Kennelly's jibes are barbed.
As a résumé of a lifetime's output, Bloodaxe's New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 is unusual in that it orders Kennelly's poems not by chronology or collection, but rather in a loosely thematic manner. To the extent that Kennelly views his own poetic mission as being a conduit for voices, in particular those of the marginalised and vilified, the strategy is largely successful. Within his own sequences, historical personages converse freely with the living and with the imaginary, and are reborn under a number of guises. The collection's title, Familiar Strangers, suggests equally the encounter between poems that would not normally be juxtaposed on facing pages, and the encounter between heavily anthologised poems such as 'My Dark Fathers', 'The Pig-killer' and 'Bread', and a number of previously uncollected poems.
Such themes as dominate - the loss of language; the harsher realities of rural and urban life; cyclical violence in all its manifestations from the historical to the sexual and quotidian - place Kennelly firmly in the tradition of an older generation of poets, notably Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague and Michael Hartnett. His bantering, irreverent, multi-vocal tone, however, is more likely to suggest comparison with several post-moderns at their more playful - Ciaran Carson, say, or Paul Muldoon - though one would have to say that the ludic manipulations of language that these employ are far more sophisticated. No doubt Kennelly is content to be a jester who wears both caps and thereby avoids easy classification.
The Liffey Press has recently embarked on a survey of key figures in contemporary Irish culture which includes film directors such as Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, and Brendan Kennelly: A Host of Ghosts by John McDonagh is a timely addition. McDonagh's study is well-informed and, in line with the series in general, is thankfully free of critical jargon. McDonagh is largely sympathetic to Kennelly, and his explorations of Kennelly's epic sequences in particular are informative. Insofar as his approach is chronological, the book acts as a useful counterpoint to Bloodaxe's thematic collection.
• David Butler is education officer at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin. His first novel, The Last European, and poetry collection, Via Crucis, are both forthcoming in 2005, from Wynkin de Worde and Dedalus respectively