Description

Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland s most distinguished poets. He achieved inter-national recognition with his shocking epic poem Cromwell, following this with the even more notorious Book of Judas, which topped the Irish bestsellers list. His latest piece of mischief, Poetry My Arse, out-Judases Cromwell, sinking its teeth into the pants of poetry itself. But his poetry has always taken on the mantle of the outcast, revealing as well as reviling, as A Time for Voices clearly shows. This selection draws on thirty years of his poetry, including classics such as My Dark Fathers, The Visitor and Poem from a Three Year Old, as well as a spattering from Cromwell.

A Time for Voices is now out of print. All the poems from the book were reprinted in his later retrospective, Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

I believe poetry must always be a flight from deadening authoritative egotism and must find its voices in the byways, laneways, backyards, nooks and crannies of self. It is critics who talk of an authentic voice ; but a poet, living his uncertainties, is riddled with different voices, many of them in vicious conflict. The poem is the arena where these voices engage each other in open and hidden conflict, and continue to do so until they are all heard. – Brendan Kennelly