His readings, both in Ireland and in the UK (particularly in the north of England where his poetry was published by Bloodaxe Books) found a deep and lasting resonance - a response which continues to flourish after Brendan’s later withdrawal from his Dublin-based public life and relocation to his native beloved Kerry where he lived until his recent death aged 85. It was a richly lived and hugely productive life. Brendan’s major books, thirty and more of them, contain a challenging, turbulent, serene and tragic view of our ordinary world, made special and memorable by the unmistakable voice which ‘gave’ the poems incantatory lift-off on the innumerable stages and platforms from which he recited his lines, drawing often from an extraordinary memory bank. The seeming nonchalance of this delivery was hard won; he prepared every moment. When a book was nearing completion, during his incredibly productive phase of the late 1980s to the early 2000s, I would stand amazed by the sheer recollective power Brendan had in recalling lines from an epic such as the ground-breaking Cromwell or The Book of Judas. This was no ordinary poet. And with his lectures the narrative of desire to enthuse and excite his audience during the time I knew him at Trinity – be it a tutorial on O’Casey, a massed lecture on Yeats, a graduate seminar on Myth or a creative writing session on the Masters’ programme – was simply legendary. As was Brendan himself. And yet the private life out of which these rainbows of words spilled with such abundance, contained its own scars and anxieties which made him identify with the outcast and the marginalized and enabled him to see and hear the experience of women in Ireland as the key to all of our democratic and freer futures. Brendan had no truck with an introverted nationalism; he spoke often to me and other friends and colleagues in Trinity of how the country needed to widen its horizons and make a more genuine and generous approach to northern society. I think he saw damage in the mindsets of political and religious conservatism, but he loved a realistic, ebullient, contradictory Ireland where people said things with such a wide angle and wry wisdom in the spoken vernacular language, wherever they were from. That’s what I recall sitting here among these books, many of them Brendan’s. The laughter, of course, and the rare unexpected shock of recognition he always brought with him as far as poetry was concerned. It mattered to him, like a basic right; one of the essentials of a common, humane decency. Was that what drew him to the great Greek tragedies and his love of Greek literature as well? I don’t know. I wrote this sonnet with this love in mind as a tribute to Brendan Kennelly and his poetry-making: The Worry Beads Brendan Kennelly 1936-2021 How could I even begin to think of you down there in the rich and loamy dark with the eager snail and echo of birds wheeling because you had already flown some time ago and were taking your leisure in a Greek spot – Santorini, I’d say, telling out the worry beads, iced tea and the paper to hand, as the sheer blue sky meets the sheer blue sea and that’s you, biding your time, thinking. Gerald Dawe (Fellow Emeritus) was Professor of English & founder-director of Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre (1998-2015) and with Brendan Kennelly co-director of the M Phil in Creative Writing, the first programme of its kind offered by an Irish University. He has published over twenty books of poetry and non-fiction since Sheltering Places appeared in 1978.
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