This book gives a breathing space for a number of poems which didn’t ﬁt into the scope of Brendan Kennelly’s Selected Poems, A Time for Voices (Bloodaxe, 1990). It contains the poem-sequences Love Cry (1972), Islandman (1977) and A Small Light (1979), as well as poems from Shelley in Dublin (1974), and the full version of A Girl, consisting of 22 songs, several of which are previously unpublished. The four sequences have been unavailable for some time, and Brendan Kennelly is re-publishing them in response to popular demand. He has written new introductions for each as well as a provocative new essay to preface the whole of Breathing Spaces. In these poems, Kennelly opens up his imagination, making a space through his poetry for constrained voices to speak, live and breathe. Many of these poems anticipate Cromwell and The Book of Judas, in which he allowed those more reviled ﬁgures their own breathing spaces. Many have been re-written, he says, ‘in the light or darkness of what I’ve come to believe about poetry and language’. Most of the work in Breathing Spaces was reprinted in Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

About the Author

Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland’s most distinguished and best loved poets, as well as a renowned teacher and cultural commentator. Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, he was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for over 30 years, and retired from teaching in 2005. He now lives in Listowel, Co. Kerry. He has published more than 30 books of poetry, including Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 (2004), which includes the whole of his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain (1998). He is best-known for two controversial poetry books, Cromwell, published in Ireland in 1983 and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 1987, and his epic poem The Book of Judas (1991), which topped the Irish bestsellers list: a shorter version was published by Bloodaxe in 2002 as The Little Book of Judas. His third epic, Poetry My Arse (1995), did much to outdo these in notoriety. All these remain available separately from Bloodaxe, along with his more recent titles: Glimpses (2001), Martial Art (2003), Now (2006), Reservoir Voices (2009), The Essential Brendan Kennelly: Selected Poems, edited by Terence Brown and Michael Longley, with audio CD (2011), and Guff (2013). His Journey into Joy: Selected Prose, edited by �ke Persson, was published by Bloodaxe in 1994, along with Dark Fathers into Light, a critical anthology on his work edited by Richard Pine. John McDonagh’s critical study Brendan Kennelly: A Host of Ghosts was published in The Liffey Press’s Contemporary Irish Writers series in 2004.

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