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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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Christmas Reading List The perfect stocking fillers by Trinity alumni and staff to curl up with over the festive season BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Faber & Faber Sally Rooney, BA (2013) Find Out More ‘Written with immense skill and illuminated by an endlessly incisive intelligence.’ The Irish Times Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They worry about sex and friendship and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? CREATIVITY: NATURE AND US Bo’s Books Dr Bo Jeffares Sekine, PhD (1977) Find Out More Read an excerpt Nature inspires us. Symbols we use in everyday life provide clues to more esoteric or metaphysical levels of reality. We play with images to link our ordinary and cosmic selves. Everyone’s ideas and emotions contribute to a shared energy field. This contemplative book illustrates universal themes linking many factors from food to stars and demonstrates how spatial progressions help to dissolve mental barriers. It also reflects how internal challenges can be expressed as external adventures. And invisible elements - such as electromagnetic energy and love – can miraculously transform material existence on a living planet. BRIGHT BURNING THINGS Bloomsbury Lisa Harding, BA, MPhil (1994) Find Out More ‘A gripping quest for self-knowledge.’ The Guardian Being Tommy’s mother is too much for Sonya. Too much love, too much fear, too much longing for the cool wine she gulps from the bottle each night. Because Sonya is burning the fish fingers, and driving too fast, and swimming too far from the shore, and Tommy’s life is in her hands. Once there was the thrill of a London stage, a glowing acting career, fast cars, handsome men. But now there are blackouts and bare cupboards, and her estranged father showing up uninvited. There is Mrs O’Malley spying from across the road. There is the risk of losing Tommy - forever.
