Product Description

Familiar Strangers is Brendan Kennelly's own selection from over 20 poetry books written over five decades. This landmark volume replaces his earlier selections A Time for Voices, Breathing Spaces and Begin. But Kennelly has revisited his life work, re-scoring familiar and estranged pieces into new gatherings which reflect his preoccupations more powerfully, bringing together poems from different times - and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems - so that they speak in chorus like the generations of people they celebrate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1443273 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* To selectively present more than four decades' worth of his poems, Kennelly unusually but effectively groups the poems thematically rather than chronologically. So doing, he illuminates connections as he reveals development. The section on history, for instance, includes sonnets from his controversial Cromwell (1983) side-by-side with short lyrics in the voice of the "Freedom Fighter," who announces that he is "the expression of the people's will. / I am a soldier, not a brute. / I do not bomb or shoot to kill. / I execute." From those poems, Kennelly proceeds to a meditation on economics while stuck in Dublin traffic and a poem in which the great poet Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth I's agent in Ireland, reappears as a rider of the late-twentieth-century Celtic Tiger who is making a killing in furniture sales. The result of such juxtapositions within the section is the reader's growing and ominous sense of how little, in fact, anything changes, in Ireland or anywhere else. Each section reads like a small, freestanding book; happily, one section, set apart from the others, preserves the entire, unaltered text of a previously published book: The Man Made of Rain (1999), Kennelly's most visionary volume. An altogether rich, wild, demanding, and fulfilling collection. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"'Newspapers celebrate greatness, heroism, achievement and genius in our midst, but sometimes don't pay sufficient attention to the real heroes who matter to us; the people who make a serious contribution to a nation's mental and spiritual well-being. A giant in this area is Brendan Kennelly. He is the people's poet. He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently. He also asks impossible questions and suggests unthinkable answers about the things that really matter. And he refuses to be precious or out of touch with the rest of us' - Jim Farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune; 'With considerable honesty and bravery Kennelly enters and becomes others in order to perceive, understand and suffer... always moving, probing and doubting, never willing or able to settle on any one certainty... There is clash and conflict, cruelty and irony, sardonic wit, passion' - Aidan Murphy; 'He lets us watch as he stands bowlegged at a crossroads in time and culture, playing stretch with knives of fear and faith, irony and soul, the fist of vision, the hard-nose of reality' - Bono; 'Kennelly's capacity to strip himself and fight in naked combat with the giants that plague us, make him Ireland's most endearing and reckless poet' - Mark Patrick Hederman; 'A very singular voice which owes nothing really to anybody, except to Kennelly's spiritual and geographical origins and, of course, to his own people' - John B. Keane; 'His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life' - Sister Stanislaus Kennedy"

About the Author
Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland's most distinguished and best loved poets, as well as a renowned teacher and cultural commentator. Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, he has been Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for the past 30 years, and retires from teaching in 2004. He has published over 20 books of poetry, including Cromwell, Glimpses, The Man Made of Rain, Martial Art, Poetry My Arse, and The Book of Judas (which topped the Irish bestsellers list). All these are available separately from Bloodaxe, the latter shortened to The Little Book of Judas.