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There’s a good feeling to Brendan Kennelly’s poems, good in the sense that he’s prepared to range far and wide for his subject-matter and to use any technique necessary to get across what he wants to say. What comes through in the poems is an openness to experience and a suggestion that it’s what is said that counts and not how fancy the poem can be in terms of its structure. Admittedly, this can lead to some of the shorter poems having a throw-away air, like remarks made in a pub conversation, amusing at the time but hardly memorable:

‘I agree he’s not two-faced,’ Mahaffy said,
‘but what’s the good of that
when the one face Nature gave him
would shame a Liffey Rat?’

But it would be wrong to give the impression that a poem like that is typical of Kennelly’s poetry. There are longer and more serious poems, such as ‘A Black-and-Tan’, where Kennelly recalls working on the buses in London in the 1950s and getting to know a man who had been one of the infamous paramilitaries sent to subjugate the Irish rebels. As Kennelly records, everything in his own background should have taught him to hate the man but he actually grew to like him:

Having been reared
to hate the thought
of a Black-and-Tan
the scum of England
more beast than man

I was somewhat surprised to find
how much I liked Will Flint
and his Black-and-Tan talk
warming my heart and mind.

     Throughout Kennelly’s poems there is a strong humanist streak, with a willingness to accept people for what they are and not expect too much of them. His subjects drink and swear and fall out and fall in love and make all the usual mistakes, and he notes it all cheerfully enough, though he’s fully aware of the pain and suffering in the world. But he knows that you have to get on with life and that it’s the living that count:

From my window now, I try to look ahead
and know, remembering what’s been done
                                                       and said,
that we must always cherish, and reject,
                                                       the dead.