Judy Gahagan
Review
Glimpses, Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe Books £8.95
These “glimpses”, according to the description on the cover “can spark a sudden flash of insight... illuminating past and present”. Some of them do - the ones quoted on the cover for example: “When love glimpsed me for the first time/ I believed in God/ though I was made of mud” (‘A first glimpse’). “The tourist photographs the Cathedral/ before he sees it./ Do we marry/ before we see each other?” (‘Before’)... but some, quite a lot to my mind, don’t. Some seem little more than “found humour” of the weekly magazine variety: “Sign in a pub in Mullingar:/ Ladies must not have children in the Bar” (‘To Ladies’). Some are bathetic:
Love is present
love is lost
a boy is drowned
off the Waterford coast
love is lost
love returns a father visits
a place of bones...
Some are banal and many just scraps of banter. There’s certainly easy pleasure to be had rummaging though them. My feeling is that a dozen pages of such glimpses might intrigue but here we have 159 pages of them. Bloodaxe have been rather generous.
Page(s) 90
magazine list
- Features
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- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
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- Dream Catcher
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- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
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- Magma
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- Matter
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- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
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- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
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- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The