Reviews
Breakfast With Sylvia - Kevin Kiely
Lagan Press, Unit 11, 1AA Bryson Street, Belfast BT5 4ES £7.95
A heady mixture of strong imagery, mythic seasoning, with a dash of
Irish loquacity makes Breakfast with Sylvia an enlivening brew. Sylvia of the title is, of course, Sylvia Plath and several of the poems bristle with the frenetic energy which one associates with her. But references to other poets come pressing, especially Ezra Pound whose madness (?) is echoed by Kiely where language takes off into the stratosphere: from illuminatio to Browning trochees/ victim of some unfaithful establishment brochures/ Surgeon-critic castigating hackneyed drivel/ amongst the printing glut and printmania/ leading your paideuma twards kulchurality/ Your rancour was not always crative/ Or did the rancour consume you? ('Who’s Afraid of Ezra Pound?') Contrast this with the spare simplicity of the rhyming couplets which make up the poem 'Skimming Sam Beckett' to appreciate the way Kiely jolts us into another dimension of language, where speech is worked like molten metal, throwing off sparks, allusions, memories and experiences. Yet through the pyrotechnics shines the cool winter light of Donegal. 'Comes the Spring' betrays a deep love for his home land, or is it a pseudo Irish ballad of the most self indulgent kind? I prefer to take it at face value, loving the images which linger long in the ear of the reader.
Page(s) 56-57
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