Forever Begin

This exhibition celebrates the anniversary of the first appearance in print, in 1959, of the work of the poet Brendan Kennelly.

Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, Brendan Kennelly made Dublin, and Trinity College, his home. He was Professor of Modern Literature in Trinity for forty years and is one of Ireland’s greatest, and most beloved, poets.

The title of the exhibition 'Begin Again' is from a poem which the poet says was inspired by his admiration of the courage of ordinary people in doing whatever it takes, every day, to just keep going.

The most remarkable changes can be observed in Kennelly's work through the decades. As a young man he was influenced by the male poets of early twentieth-century Ireland.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), among the foremost poets of rural Ireland, was a particular influence on Kennelly.
The ability to find 'ebullient fragments of mystery’ in commonplace experiences is a trait Kennelly shared with the older poet.

Kennelly's transcription of Kavanagh's The Great Hunger (1942).

The long-form poem (which he learned from Patrick Kavanagh) remained vital to Kennelly's work. Kennelly garnered critical attention for poems, such as 'My dark fathers' (1966), that deal with the effects of Ireland’s colonial history.

The Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth-century in Ireland is an awful presence (in every sense of the word 'awful') in the Irish psyche. This true story of the woman dying in her dying husband's arms is the subject of another poem ('Quarantine'), by another great poet Eavan Boland.

The Kennelly Archive in Trinity College Library Dublin contains much that is valuable in documenting the poet's literary practice. These boarding passes are among several little scraps used by Kennelly when he was caught out for want of paper when inspiration struck.

Kennelly's archives document the poet's teaching practice. This reading list was produced for his undergraduate classes in the 1980s; note the almost all-male line-up. This is an important starting point for a significant change in the poet's literary practice.

A change to be noted over the poet's lifetime is his increasing respect for the female voice. In 1970, Kennelly edited an anthology of Irish verse which contained only six female authors out of ninety. However, he was the first to react, twenty years later, to the 'Field Day' debacle (another gender-discriminatory anthology) with Ireland’s women: writings past and present (Dublin,1994) which he invited poet Katie Donovan to edit with him.

Kennelly's introduction to Ireland's Women: writings past and present selected by Katie Donovan, A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly (Dublin 1994).

In Kennelly's early poetry, women were observed from the outside, as exotic or eccentric. Later, as he lent his poetic voice to others, he foregrounded the purely female voice. His adaptation of Medea opened in 1988. He also produced a version of Euripides' Trojan women in 1993.

Kennelly's belief that poetry has a democratic function underwrites one of the defining characteristics of his later poetry - letting others' voices take over from his own in his work. In this way the poet contrives to give a voice to marginalised individuals and communities.

Among the most notorious outsiders to whom Kennelly gave voice was Oliver Cromwell (d.1658). Kennelly's wish to leave behind the 'fierce simplicities of hatred' inspired his long-form poem on the most loathed figure in Irish history.

Kennelly's imagination permitted Cromwell to speak, not merely as a murdering tyrant, but as a brother and as an affectionate father to his daughter. The poet said 'the imagination provides the most effective means of confronting the inherited hatreds buried in the self ... I tried to open my mind, heart and imagination to a man I was from childhood taught to hate'.

Continuing his act of imaginative expression of outsiders' voices, Kennelly wrote The Book of Judas (Hexham, 1991). He wanted to explore 'how people who are thought to be "beyond all hope" can be allowed to have a voice?'

Kennelly not only gave voice to historical outcasts such as Cromwell and Judas, but to prisoners, the mentally ill, and, as in this poem, to the almost-illiterate, the wordless and the violent.

We did warn you about 'demotic language'.

The poet among poets.
Front: Leanne O’Sullivan, Brendan Kennelly, Rita-Ann Higgins, Katie Donovan

Back:John O’Donnell, Terence Brown, Gerald Dawe, Michael Longley, Gerard Smyth