PAT BORAN
(Sunday Tribune)
One long poem or 486 short ones, Brendan Kennelly's Poetry My Arse is not so much a book for the coffee-table as one for the butcher's block. Essentially about desire and responsibility - though it also takes in Dublin, Ireland, love, betrayal, destruction, begrudgery, solitude and loneliness, and the Beckettian tug-of-war between speech and silence, truth and lies - it features one Ace de Horner, poet, wanderer, lover and generally sad little ******* trawling the streets of Dublin in pursuit of poems. That de Horner's name and the name of his ugly dog, Kanooce, conjure up, phonetically, that academy of artists to be found on Merrion Square south reminds us, if reminding were needed, that poets and poetry are the primary subjects of this 'biting' satire.
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that these are its exclusive concerns. In investigating the desires and responsibilities of poets who, in writing about a thing, are in danger of draining off its life's blood, Kennelly draws parallels with a number of other groups who also behave in the manner of parasites. The two-line poem 'Pact', for example, draws an uncomfortable parallel between the actions of poets and those of paramilitaries: "No trouble. They sign. No nervous cough. / Peace is a moment when murder pays off."
However, in making it clear that de Horner is a part of himself - "I slip in and out of myself / Ace slips in and out of himself / till he is me / and I am he" ('In and out') - Kennelly manages to avoid one of the main pitfalls of satire, the failure to recognise oneself in whatever target.
So the poet who wants to record also kills. Kennelly's own solution to this dilema is to include all those things which might, in the 'normal' poem, be left on the cutting-room floor. Hence the huge number of jokes, asides, diatribes and snatches of reported speech which make Poetry My Arse the sprawling monster that it is.
The danger with this approach is, of course, that the central thread may get lost in the cacophany of voices and, indeed, there are times when a more rigorous eye to the 'plot' of what is almost a verse-novel might have revived an occasionally flagging momentum.
Nevertheless, a poet who has already produced so much and earned so many Brownie points - after all, he is a "Trinity bleedin' College Professor" - could easily retire or, at least, slip into something more comfortable, and Kennelly must be applauded for challenging not just our but his own expectations of what poems are and can do.
