Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004

New
Paperback
2004
$30.19

Familiar Strangers is Brendan Kennelly's own selection from over 20 poetry books written over five decades. This landmark volume replaces his earlier selections A Time for Voices, Breathing Spaces and Begin. But Kennelly has revisited his life work, re-scoring familiar and estranged pieces into new gatherings which reflect his preoccupations more powerfully, bringing together poems from different times - and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems - so that they speak in chorus like the generations of people they celebrate.

Synopsis

Familiar Strangers is Brendan Kennelly's own selection from over 20 poetry books written over five decades. This landmark volume replaces his earlier selections A Time for Voices, Breathing Spaces and Begin. But Kennelly has revisited his life work, re-scoring familiar and estranged pieces into new gatherings which reflect his preoccupations more powerfully, bringing together poems from different times - and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems - so that they speak in chorus like the generations of people they celebrate.

$30.19

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 496
Edition: 1st Edition
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published: 27 May 2004
ISBN 10: 1852246634
ISBN 13: 9781852246631

Media Reviews

'Newspapers celebrate greatness, heroism, achievement and genius in our midst, but sometimes don't pay sufficient attention to the real heroes who matter to us; the people who make a serious contribution to a nation's mental and spiritual well-being. A giant in this area is Brendan Kennelly. He is the people's poet. He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently. He also asks impossible questions and suggests unthinkable answers about the things that really matter. And he refuses to be precious or out of touch with the rest of us' - Jim Farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune; 'With considerable honesty and bravery Kennelly enters and becomes others in order to perceive, understand and suffer... always moving, probing and doubting, never willing or able to settle on any one certainty... There is clash and conflict, cruelty and irony, sardonic wit, passion' - Aidan Murphy; 'He lets us watch as he stands bowlegged at a crossroads in time and culture, playing stretch with knives of fear and faith, irony and soul, the fist of vision, the hard-nose of reality' - Bono; 'Kennelly's capacity to strip himself and fight in naked combat with the giants that plague us, make him Ireland's most endearing and reckless poet' - Mark Patrick Hederman; 'A very singular voice which owes nothing really to anybody, except to Kennelly's spiritual and geographical origins and, of course, to his own people' - John B. Keane; 'His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life' - Sister Stanislaus Kennedy

Author Bio

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 has been Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for the past 30 years, and retires from teaching in 2004. He has published over 20 books of poetry, including Cromwell, Glimpses, The Man Made of Rain, Martial Art, Poetry My Arse, and The Book of Judas (which topped the Irish bestsellers list). All these are available separately from Bloodaxe, the latter shortened to The Little Book of Judas.