Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland's most popular and prolific poets. Over the past five decades he has written thousands of poems published in over 30 books of poetry, including three previous editions of Selected Poems. Published on his 75th birthday, this new selection presents just over a hundred of Kennelly's most essential poems, accompanied by an audio CD of his own readings drawn a variety of recordings made over the years. The Essential Brendan Kennelly has been edited by two lifelong admirers of his work. Like Kennelly, Terence Brown studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he taught until 2009; he is now Fellow Emeritus of the college. Michael Longley, who also studied at Trinity College, went on to become one of Ireland's leading poets and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007-10. Terence Brown & Michael Longley write (from their foreword): 'Brendan Kennelly is a poet of rare gifts, who at all stages of his career has written distinctive, memorable and powerful poems. We hope that this selection will allow readers to appreciate anew, or for the first time, a body of work that ranges from tender lyricism to the bleakest despair at the human condition, from bawdily comic narrative to the pleasingly epigrammatic squib, from mythic consciousness to social satire Yet each literary mode the lyrical and its obverse, a reductively satirirc assault on "the poetic" shares what has seemed the basis of all of Kennelly's poetry: a quest for authenticity of emotion undertaken with high moral intent. In each, as Beckett said of the painter Jack Yeats, the poet "stakes his being".'
