Two More From Brendan Kennelly

UNION

When salmon swarmed in the brown tides
And cocks raised their lusty din
And her heart beat like a wild bird's heart,
She left her kin.

A black ass brayed in the village,
Men ploughed and mowed,
There was talk of rising water
When he struck the road.

Words stranger than were scattered
Over the shuttered dead
Were faint as child-songs in their ears
When they stretched in bed.


THE SINGING GIRL IS EASY IN HER SKILL

The singing girl is easy in her skill.
We are more human than we were before.
We cannot see just now why men should kill

Although it seems we are condemned to spill
The blood responding to the ocean's roar.
The singing girl is easy in her skill.

That light transfiguring the window-sill
Is peace that shyly knocks on every door.
We cannot see just now why men should kill.

This room, this house, this world all seem to fill
With faith in which no human heart is poor.
The singing girl is easy in her skill.

Though days are maimed by many a murderous will
And lovers shudder at what lies in store
We cannot see just now why men should kill.

It's possible we may be happy still,
No living heart can ever ask for more.
We cannot see just now why men should kill.
The singing girl is easy in her skill.

--BRENDAN KENNELLY


P.S.  I feel I am going to, in Wordsworth's words and Heaney's echo, "singing school" with Kennelly.  And glad I am, indeed.

Brendan Kennelly: "Remember What Marina Said?"

REMEMBER WHAT MARINA SAID?

You'll never do it.

You know you'll never do it.

Admit you know you'll never do it.

The teacher said so.

The doctor and the priest agreed.

They know you were born to fail.

So did everyone at the Cake Sale

And the Book Sale.

Xavier Mulligan TD, not famous for his candour,

Told you to forget it

As did everyone at the Annual General Meeting

Of the Ballyspanner Football Club.

Wise Tynan swears it's totally beyond you.

Wise Tynan knows the story inside out,

He's got the whole thing sussed.

And when you say that you can do it

You fill wise Tynan with disgust.

And now, for the first time,

After long thought, and then some more,

Let me tell you what I've never told you before.

I who supported you

From the day that Clifford beat you

Up against the classroom door

For your stammering and your left-hand writing,

I tell you now, my friend of a lifetime,

You'll never do it.

Remember what Marina said?

Failure is your daily bread.

What's this?

I told you to lie down,

Cover your face with your hands,

Keep your mouth shut.

Be seen, I said, not heard.

What's this?

God in heaven, you're up,

You're opening your heart, your mouth,

Wild flower, you're doing it,

I can't believe it, it's impossible,

You're the most impossible man I've ever known,

You won't lie down,

You live as if you don't believe in right and wrong,

You're out of your mind,

Your mind feels good, being rid of you,

No right, no wrong,

Just you,

The most impossible man in the world,

Song.

--BRENDAN KENNELLY

P.S.  Consider Kennelly's skillful use of end-stops vs. enjambment to make the poem itself act out the move from being bound to being free.

Kennelly: "A Singing Wound"

WHAT?

'What is my body?' I asked the man made of rain.
'A temple,' he said, 'and the shadow thrown
by the temple, dreamfield, painbag, lovescene,
hatestage, miracle jungle under the skin.

Cut it open.  Pardon the apparition.'

'What is my blood?' I dared then.
'Her pain birthing you and me,
the slow transfiguration of pain
into knowing what it means to be

climbing the hill of blood, trawling the poisoned sea.'

'Where have I been when they say I have returned?'
'Where beginning and end
combine to make a picture, compose a sound
reminding you that love is a singing wound

and I could be your friend.'

--BRENDAN KENNELLY,

from "The Man Made of Rain"

Collected in
Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems, 1960 - 2004
Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

Thunder, Free, Curse: Three Poems from Brendan Kennelly

SPECIAL THUNDER

He had to reach the island in the winter gale.
From Saleen Quay he pushed the little boat
Over the rough stones till she came afloat;
You'd swear he could see nothing when he hoisted sail
And cut the dark.  Once a grey shape blurred
Above his head while pitchblack water slapped
And tried to climb over the side but dropped
Into the sea, thwarted.  In time, he heard

The special thunder of the island shore,
He hauled the boat in, sheltered near a rock
And smiled to hear the sea's defeated roar;
Breathing as though the air were infinitely sweet,
He watched the mainland where the hard wind struck.
The island clay felt good beneath his feet.


FREE

Once ever a boat capsized on Red
So simply he couldn't tell why.
One moment the sun caressed his head,
The next, his world was water.  His eyes
Opened, closed, hurt by the urgent green
That pressed him down, down into the mud
Until his face touched the obscene
Slime.  Strange, though, how foul touch calmed his blood.

His grey head about to split in pieces,
He kicked free, free till he broke into the air.
Breathing hugely, he righted his craft in time,
Clambered aboard.  Ghoulish faces
Of water haunted him, seemed to stare
At his repose.  The sun tasted of green slime.


CURSE

They said a curse was on the boat.
It would never put to sea again
Because two men were lost from it.
Red bought it from a fisherman
For thirty pounds and four tides later
Headed it out into the Shannon.
'There's no such thing as luck,' we heard him mutter
'There's but the skill and strength of a man

With sure hands and sense in his head.
And one thing more.  Luck was never known
To drown the living or raise the dead
But many a cocksure man went down
Because his trust was not where it should be.
Out there, forget your brothers.  Trust the sea.'


--BRENDAN KENNELLY,
from his Love Cry sequence,
collected in Breathing Spaces: Early Poems,
Bloodaxe Books, 1992.

Lighting By Bushmills -- And Brendan Kennelly

Self-Portrait #52.

"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.

"The Sea In The Head": Two More From Kennelly's "Islandman"

When will we permit the sea in the head

To flow as it will?

The moon has laws but no theories.

It sends out a cold, golden call

And hangs in suspense for the answer

We fear to give.

I would release the sea in the head.

I would let it live,

Pour through the brain's darkest caves,

Out through the eyes,

Touching the distant skin of other 

Minds and bodies.

Who will say which is more real --

My hands on the sea,

The strange flesh or the hurt roar

That is part of me?

Who will say which is more felt --

Loneliness

Or the desolation written on stones

When the sea withdraws?

I have learned to live both night and day

Uncertain of day and night.

This beautiful island is poised forever

In a dubious light.

--Brendan Kennelly,

Two poems from his "Islandman," a book or sequence of poems that  I've pointed to and quoted from before here and here.

Borrowed, with respect, from this volume:

Brendan Kennelly, Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
Bloodaxe Books: Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992.

Kennelly: One from "Islandman"

The sea's music affirms

What at best I have half-known.

I turn deaf ears to it for the most part

But now and again

It coincides with a music I find in myself.

I hear

'My glittering green is your power to move,

My spindrift is your fear,

My roar is your blood's emphasis

On what you can hardly face,

A cosmic push towards nothing,

Green weed like a necklace

Round the world's throat that whispers

Always back to me

How those on land live to reject

The insights of the sea.'

--Brendan Kennelly,

from "Islandman":

pages 337-338 of Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004

Persona: What Kennelly Says

Consider these provocative paragraphs from Irish poet Brendan Kennelly:

The use of a persona in poetry is not a refusal to confront and explore the self but a method of extending it, procuring for it a more imaginative and enriching breathing space by driving out the demons of embarrassment and inhibition and some, at least, of the more crippling forms of shyness and sensitivity. A persona, though apparently shadowy and elusive, can be a liberating agent. It/he/she can provide friendly company in loneliness and give dignity to desolation.

Through an act of sustained and deliberate indirectness, it is possible to say more completely whatever one has to say. It is one of the fertile paradoxes of poetry that one can be more candid by engaging less in frontalism and by listening more keenly to the voices of the personae in the wings. A persona embodies not only some essential, peculiarly bewildered aspects of one's self but also, one hopes, something of everybody. I don't know why, but I'm convinced that the persona, obliquely manipulating and orchestrating the monstrous yet magnificent energies of egotism, is capable of revealing what the poet at any given moment believes he knows of reality in such a way that, for example, horror is presented with a grace, and therefore a precision, only rarely available to the mere self. Like a courteous host, the personal introduces the self to itself and lets the dialogue begin and continue unimpeded. (Other individuals at the party may crash in, of course. Such interruptions must be endured and allowed to expire before the dialogue can resume.)

We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel. Out of that 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.) My islandman is as real to me as the people I meet every day because he is, in fact, these very people, but without their disconcerting ways, arbitrary opinions, puzzling eccentricities, transient yet upsetting incursions in the the mere, messy self which nevertheless remains the truest if murkiest source of poetry. The persona helps me to see through and under these necessary distractions to the essential humanity of people and therefore to come into contact with what I hope is my own. It is possible, and necessary, to hope that we are beginning to be more human. Poetry insists that we, with the help of the liberating persona, allow ourselves to dare become ourselves, for a time at least. The persona appears to want to make the self more fluid, multiple, articulate. It is like a shadow that darklylightly stresses the validity of the substance.

There may be simple and more effective ways for a poet to do this. I'd love to know them because I want to love every heartbeat, every musical second of happiness and grief, boredom and fun and the usual no-man's-land of viable and reasonably rewarded half-being, permitted between stoneself and definitive dust. Whatever forces help one to love this frequently muted music of time are to be welcomed by the imagination and intelligence, body and soul. Whatever or whoever you are, be with me now.

--from the prose introduction to the poetic "Islandman" in Brendan Kennelly's Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: 2004.

I've quoted extensively from page 323 of Familiar Strangers. I feel the need to read and reflect upon these paragraphs on persona. I hope you find them as useful and engaging, as provoking and promising as I do.

Time to reread "Islandman" too.

Kennelly: "My Heart Is Jacked From Writing"

COLUMKILLE THE WRITER

(from the Irish)

My heart is jacked from writing.

My sharp quill shakes.

My thin pen spills out

blood from my stormy lakes.

A stream of God's own wisdom

flushes my hand.

It blesses the waiting page.

It blesses where holly is found.

My thin pen is a traveller

in a world where books are waiting.

Who dares to see? Say? Who bothers to listen?

My heart is jacked from writing.

--Brendan Kennelly

WHAT ELSE?

Be with me Brendan of Ardfert when I

Question words. Song and speech like mine were cast

Aside when, stung by treachery,

You killed a man. Brendan, was it remorse

Made you confront the problematic sea,

The gruff distraction of the wind until

You breathed the cold air of sanctity?

I see you searching with a passionate will

The changing waste at feet and head,

The constant abyss. What reassured you?

Glint of leaping fish? Arrogance of birds?

The sea's tempers? All that has been said

About your lonely strength and rage is true.

What else subdues the sea or masters words?

--Brendan Kennelly