Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Richard Kell is a prolific poet, whose work covers a wide range of interests, including geology, science, astrology, politics and sociology, all of which are reflected through the prism of an academic lens. At times I felt thwarted by his complexity of style, which made absorption of the poems very difficult. A tighter edit on the number of poems included would have enhanced this collection, not diminished it. That said, there are poems of great depth and perception.

     The son of a Methodist preacher from Northern Ireland, many of his poems reflect a preoccupation with sifting through the Christian dogma which surrounded him as a child. Two verses from one of his best poems, ‘Holiday in Limerick’, recall the atmosphere with stringent clarity:

Home from an Ulster boarding school
I dreamed away the hours in my father’s
                                                       church -
cosy, uniformed, one of the Methodists
too few and peaceful not to be tolerated,
too poor to install an organ. I composed
my mood all morning on a grand,
bathing in lustrous ninths entitled ‘Lotus’.

Cycling home, I loved to push hard
into the wind that made the Shannon glint;
to see, in floods of air above the castle,
rooks straining too and lapsing,
and in the far stillness, where God began,
the curve of Keeper Hill.

I like this poem because of its open hearted quality. Here, at last, I found clues to the personality of the poet, who keeps himself submerged in clever ideas for too much of the time.

     Meditative poems circling round questions of science, creativity, religion and morality, are plentiful. In ‘The Dancers’, a long narrative poem, Kell mixes memory with myth to explore his own ambiguities on the subject of faith. The poem tells the story of Billy Bray of Truro, a miner who becomes trapped in a mine for six days and undergoes a religious revelation:

Alone on the sixth day, lost
in the nightstorm of his mind, he turns
to the first and simplest act, the firm
reality of touch: the Word,
cradled in miner’s hands,
opening like bread broken, like split rock,
reveals the buried light of his salvation:
Ask, and it shall be given you;
seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

In this ambitious poem, Kell convinces us of his own faith in human nature. After looking down the barrel of history at how men have failed to find peace, he concludes:

I call this faith of a kind:
to see in art
the nature of the mind,
and to suppose it shapes
from chaos, from the absurd,
a structured wholeness that implies the Word.

     Kell is a witty poet, his ballads about suburbia share an Orwellian horror of such places, where people’s lives are dominated by the dull grind of repaying the mortgage and polishing the car. Yet there are also darker elements here, to which Kell alludes, of the concealed pyschopaths and sexually disturbed people who live in such ‘nice’ neighbourhoods.

     The tragic death of Kell’s wife by drowning throws a shadow of grief over the centre of the book; the subject is too important to be part of a general collection.

     My favourite poems are two short evocations of his childhood, ‘Walking with Matron’ and ‘The Entertainers’, which are precise, shocking and vivid.

     Still, this is a worthy collection, which will be welcomed by Kell’s readers and friends.