Poetry My Arse: A Poem - Softcover

Kennelly calls this "a riotous epic poem," and that it certainly is. While others of his generation of Irish poets are complacently selecting for their Selecteds and collecting for their Collecteds , Kennelly is charging ahead again in a sequence--if one can use so diminutive a term for a 350-page book with at least that many poems in it--that builds on his last two books. Whereas Cromwell (1983) brought us the chillingly banal inner world of its eponymous antihero, and The Book of Judas (1991) found vestiges of its title character in the acts of each of us, Poetry My Arse centers on a crafty but failed Dublin poet by the name of Ace de Horner. Or does it? In a brilliant introductory essay, Kennelly enjoins us to remember that Dublin itself has been a character in many Irish works, and so it is here. Kennelly's Dublin is a postcolonialist's dream (or nightmare)--incestuous, gossip mongering, deceitful, and vibrant with life. Through it, Ace and his playmate Janey Mary (a "vulgar bitch with a tongue on her like a slurrypit" ) travel with "guilt complexes on flexi-time," making love and poetry. Not since Joyce has an Irish author so captured the soul of Dublin and thereby of Ireland. Patricia Monaghan