POETRY: Reservoir VoicesBy Brendan Kennelly Bloodaxe Books, 94pp, £8.95
VOICE HAS always been a central concern of Brendan Kennelly's poetry. In over 30 books, from the early lyrics of My Dark Fathersto the expansive polyphonies of Cromwell and Judas, he has given a voice to outsiders, rebels, vagabonds and charlatans. In Reservoir Voicesthe poems assume the voice not of a person, historical, mythological or otherwise, but of emotions, states of mind, even body parts. As Kennelly writes in his prefatory note, "the voice of each poem in this book is each poem's title". So we have titles such as Shame, Mercy, Flesh, Lonelinessand Poemwhere Kennelly tells us, "Words are wild creatures". But the wildness and savagery of much of Kennelly's earlier work is tempered here by more tender notes.
The reservoir of the title is both a literal reservoir, the one Kennelly "sat alone" by near Boston College in the autumn of 2007 when he wrote this book, and a metaphoric one, a reservoir of knowing the world, a reservoir of tenderness and awe. In Prayerhe writes, "Whether for the living / or the dead, I am waiting, / waiting to be said."
In many ways, what Kennelly has been doing over the course of his life is something Keats set forth in a letter to his brothers nearly 300 years ago when he wrote about “negative capability”, that ability to enter into the essence of other beings and things. In another letter, it is as if Keats has imagined Brendan Kennelly the poet, because “a Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body”.
That act of “filling” is Kennelly’s project and loneliness is its impetus, “to step beyond the mere self and create space for those voices that wander not only through our minds but through the air about us, deep in our receptive beings”.
Many of the poems are rhyming tercets, tumbling three-lined stanzas that take the form of a “riddle”. But the puzzle and pleasure of the riddle is refused by lending each title the riddle’s answer. I read the poems a second time without looking at the titles and had much more fun with them. Imagine, for example, we had not been told what the following poem was called:
Here you come, striding up
that leafy street,
looking for me.
I’m here.
Remember sitting under that
tree in Pavia?
We were together there
and I knew, for an hour,
your happy blood.
Open you heart now,
let me enter it,
I want to live in you
for good.
It's title, and the answer to the riddle, is Peace. In another riddle we are told of a "he" who "enjoyed driving strangers whose faces / were transformed by a new kind of hope / in a city of possibility". Again, it is a beautifully conjured image, one that may have been even more magical had the reader discovered what the poem was about rather than being told in the title, in this case Education.
The child-like wonder that has marked much of Kennelly's work is still present, but it is "the emptiness of intense loneliness" and how Kennelly surrenders to it that gives these poems their real power. More than any other book, Reservoir Voicesreveals in its acts of ventriloquism the veiled accents of Kennelly himself. "I serve love and hate, cowardice and courage / everywhere", he writes in Envelope. With awards and plaudits going to many of Kennelly's contemporaries, it may feel like Kennelly himself has gone into the shadows a little. In fact, the poet writes that there's "nothing to equal shadow-madness", but that "I plan to dance my way through pain".
Reservoir Voicesis a brilliant and searching book, resolute and plural it in its execution, multitudinous in its efforts to honour the divisions within us and praise the multiple selves we all carry. "Sometimes", Kennelly writes, "dark loneliness can lead to light". Amen.
Paul Perry’s most recent book is
The Orchid Keeper
, published by the Dedalus Press.
* Brendan Kennelly will read tomorrow at 3pm in the Abbey theatre
