"We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel. Out of that same selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood. The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry. (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.)"
--Brendan Kennelly, from his Islandman,
quoted in his Breathing Spaces: Early Poems,
which I'm excerpted, respectfully, here, among other places in this blog.
I've felt like an Islandman, an enisled "selfstone", and I have wanted others to feel like islandmen or personae too, though I certainly didn't quite have the words for it until this passage from Kennelly.
