Poet Mary Kennelly Mary Kennelly’s first collection, Sunny Spells, Scattered Showers was published in 2004. Since then subsequent books have appeared from a number of Irish publishers.
On the Wind and the Singing Tide is her first collection from Salmon Poetry, “one of the most consequential houses in the Irish literary world in the last half century” according to her editor, Denis Smyth Díaz. Mary, he says, is “a force of nature… crafting poems that reframe the everyday with startling precision and profound empathy”.
If she is a force of nature she also finds the gentler things in herself, writing lovingly of family, her parents, her husband, her children and her uncles, namely the poet Brendan Kennelly and his brother Fr John.
Now becoming a crone, an aged siren, as she describes herself, she has seen a century of storm and death, widows’ tears, lovers’ lies. Past child bearing age she fondly remembers the birth of her daughter Ruth which, she recalls, made her whole as daughter, sister, lover and mother.
Contemporary
She writes wonderfully about Jesus from a contemporary woman’s point of view. She is particularly good on Mary Magdalene who has been mistaken for a whore (she was not) and whose memory is misrepresented, even insulted, by being associated with the Magdalene Laundries. Christ lies bleeding still, she writes as she seeks not understanding but faith. Hers is a strong and loving faith where, in a less than perfect world, there are no illusions left.
She writes of her native Ballylongford in Co. Kerry. “This is my place”, she writes. “I could not be/myself in any other. /This place has made me/what I am” and later, she states, echoing the Milesian poet Amergin, “I am/sky and wind and water”.
She takes a feisty look at men, particularly pompous old men with great notions, than which, she tells us, there is nothing more foolish. Entering “the darker parts”, she moves “Into the Grey”, her heart-rending, frank and terrible love poems to her uncles Fr John and Brendan who are suffering from dementia and are in their last days. Desperate for any hint of light, she is utterly exposed to revelation as, for instance, she reads from the Gospel of St John to her dying uncle, Fr John. In wise, compassionate poems she charts her uncles’ decline into the good night where death, she understands, is “simply travelling on”.
Mary Kennelly invites us into her world, a woman with no illusions about that world, about herself, about organised religion, about love and relationships, about men”
On the Wind and the Singing Tide is an account of the well lived, examined life exploring “a whole wide world” from tentative beginnings to the maturity of a peace that passes understanding, her feelings, she concedes, “not tamed but tempered” by love.
Mary Kennelly invites us into her world, a woman with no illusions about that world, about herself, about organised religion, about love and relationships, about men. Caustic at times, she is never cynical. She writes in formal and free verse which is readily accessible (she has written elsewhere castigating verse which is impenetrable to the ordinary poetry lover) and will give a lot of pleasure to a lot of people.
In welcoming this book, I salute Mary Kennelly for her independence, her courage and her ability to enter the other whether it be as a Magdalene, a St John or a person suffering from dementia. A remarkable achievement.