Willow

To understand
A little of how a shaken love
May be sustained

Consider
The giant stillness
Of a willow

After a storm.
This morning it is more than peaceful
But last night that great form

Was tossed and hit
By what seemed to me
A kind of cosmic hate,

An infernal desire
To harass and confuse,
Mangle and bewilder

Each leaf and limb
With every vicious
Stratagem

So that now I cannot grasp
The death of nightmare.
How it has passed away

Or changed to this
Stillness,
This clean peace

That seems so unshakable
A branch beyond my reach says
"It is well

"For me to feel
The transfiguring breath
Of evil

"Because yesterday
The roots by which I live
Lodged in apathetic clay.

"But for that fury
How should I be rid of the slow death?
How should I know

"That what a storm can do
Is to terrify my roots
And make me new?"

~ Brendan Kennelly ~


(A Time for Voices)

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Brendan Kennelly (born 1936) is a popular Irish poet and novelist. He is Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin.
Poetry

Kennelly’s poetry can be scabrous, down-to-earth and colloquial. He avoids intellectual pretension and literary posturing, and his attitude to poetic language could be summed up in the title of one of his epic poems, “Poetry my Arse”. Another long (400 page) epic poem, “The Book of Judas”, published in 1991, topped the Irish bestseller list.

He is a prolific and fluent writer, with more than twenty books of poems to his credit, including My Dark Fathers (1964), Collection One: Getting Up Early (1966), Good Souls to Survive (1967), Dream of a Black Fox (1968), Love Cry (1972), The Voices (1973), Shelley in Dublin (1974), A Kind of Trust (1975), Islandman (1977), A Small Light (1979) and The House That Jack Didn’t Build (1982).

Kennelly is no stranger to literary controversy, particularly in works such as “Cromwell”, about the English Roundhead and Puritan whose army sacked the small Irish city of Drogheda and slaughtered its Royalist garrison and townspeople in 1649.

Kennelly has edited several other anthologies, including “Between Innocence and Peace: Favourite Poems of Ireland” (1993), “Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present, with Katie Donovan and A. Norman Jeffares” (1994), and “Dublines,” with Katie Donovan (995).

He is also the author of two novels, “The Crooked Cross” (1963) and “The Florentines” (1967), and three plays in a Greek Trilogy, Antigone, Medea and The Trojan Women.

Kennelly is an Irish language (Gaelic) speaker, and has translated Irish poems in “A Drinking Cup” (1970) and “Mary” (Dublin 1987). A selection of his collected translations was published as “Love of Ireland: Poems from the Irish” (1989).

Controversies

Kennelly is a much-loved poet in Ireland, but his overall place in the Irish poetic canon may be somewhat controversial, Some consider “Cromwell” to be a major work, one of the most important Irish poems of the twentieth century. Others may prefer to think of him, despite his academic standing, as anti-intellectual or lacking in complexity in a period when modernist poetry, from TS Eliot to later William Butler Yeats, tended to be esoteric and difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Kennelly