MOST POETS come and go unnoticed through public places, seldom recognised or more likely not at all known by the general throng through which they pass. The poet, Brendan Kennelly, has long been an exception to that situation. He is recognised, stopped by strangers, and has his own poems quoted back at him – and those poems have earned him the distinction of often being referred to as the “people’s poet”.
Kennelly, who celebrates his 75th birthday this weekend, is certainly one of the country’s most popular poets and anyone who has read his poems, or had one of those public encounters with him, knows how deeply he has gazed into and thought about the human condition. The best attributes of heart and mind stand together in his work.
The well-known smile and that eye-bright twinkle cannot camouflage this brooding quality in Kennelly’s “memorable and powerful” poems, as the editors of a recently published new selection call them.
His curiosity as a writer is immense, and it has taken him into the worlds of two of the most reviled and controversial figures in history – Judas and Oliver Cromwell. Edmund Burke, whose statue stands outside Trinity College, a place with which Kennelly is so deeply connected, said that poetry was the “art of substantiating shadows”. His two marvellously inventive long poems on both of those subjects do just that with insight and a poetic daring that is all too rare. This willingness to give voice to others has been a constant feature of his poetry.
Kennelly’s appeal among a wide readership, however, also relates to other aspects of his work, especially his celebration of the ordinary and his evocations of a Kerry childhood. Ever the keen observer of human foibles, he is something of a connoisseur of the traits that make up the Irish character – in both men and women – and has used that understanding wisely, wittily and often with a sense of fun, in his poems.
As well as his life-long vocation as a poet, Kennelly was for many years a teacher of renown who passed on an invaluable legacy, his deep and great love and knowledge of poetry, to many students.
One of his most popular and frequently published and recited poems, Begin, is certainly a poem for our uncertain times. It is only one of his many gifts to us:
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.