“At the bridge over the big river at the eel weir the poet’s country begins”: The Elk and the Ponderosa, an essay in Benedict Kiely’s collection All the Way to Bantry Bay (1978), opens at Toomebridge. It’s a place whose significance has gradually grown by an accretion of political, cultural and environmental factors. The east-west Belfast-Derry road crosses the river Bann here, the river flows north from Lough Neagh towards the Atlantic, and the traveller passes from the east of Northern Ireland towards the economically disadvantaged west – for the Bann is as much a cultural and statistical signifier as it is a river.
Here one stands too amid the landscapes that Seamus Heaney made his own – and today, of course, one cannot but be aware of both lough and river as near-sterile bodies of water, the local environment poisoned almost to death by intensive agriculture.
In this essay, we meet the author on the bridge in the company of Heaney himself and entirely alive to these accretions. There is poignancy in reading Kiely’s long-ago observations of Toome’s then-thriving eel fishery, beginning with a discourse on the significance of lampreys down the ages, ranging from Tudor England to his own home place around Omagh. From here, he takes in the events of 1798 in Toome, reflects on the human impact of the more recent Troubles and on the legacies of the writer Ethna Carbery and scholar Colm Ó' Lochlainn, and recalls Thomas Moore’s observations of Lough Neagh.
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And then, “I can walk a little apart from weir-master and poet and professor to meditate on the way in which the poet, standing here on the border of his own country, has looked on the eels and seen in their comings and goings a reflection, in the lough, of the lives of men.” There is generosity here, knowledge, historical and political insight, bubbling wit – and all within the essay’s first few paragraphs.
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A Benedict Kiely Reader: Drink to the Bird and Selected Essays review - Words on the importance of place
This Benedict Kiely Reader is filled with such wise material. Kiely was known in his day as a consummate radio performer – contemporary audiences were familiar with his RTÉ Sunday Miscellany broadcasts, delivered with verve – and there is a similar sense in these essays of Kiely’s strength as a communicator. His writing springs from an awareness of the power of orality: it is directed both to a substantial audience and to an individual, simultaneously collective in its reach and impressively intimate.
And throughout, there is a remarkable deftness at work: in his obituary in The Irish Times, Kiely’s writing was described as “highly traditional, not at all given to literary and linguistic pyrotechnics” – but it might just as readily be argued that there is a radical formal edge at work in such multilayered writing, to say nothing of considerable technical skill in keeping so many ideas and references simultaneously in play.
As Colum McCann has noted, “Somehow there was a disingenuous idea that Kiely was a traditional, or entrenched, writer. Nothing could be further from the truth.” His writing was filled with substance: his late essay, The Whores on the Half-doors (1999), for example, reflects on Ireland’s 20th-century literary culture with considerable insight, ranging from Alice Milligan to Kate O’Brien to Seán Ó Faoláin – and there is a welcome trenchant note as he considers the State’s compulsion to ban books (including his own): the “determined persecution of Edna O’Brien,” he observes, “had something pathological about it”.
Volumes of selected writings can leave the reader hungry – but this collection anticipates such peckish rumblings, in that it contains the entirety of the memoir Drink to the Bird (1991) which traces Kiely’s life from his birth and schooldays, and affords his ideas wider spaces in which to roam.
All of Kiely’s work reflects on the importance of place – “he became possessed by places” writes Paul Clements in his thoughtful introduction to the book – and Drink to the Bird is no exception, remembering with gratitude Omagh’s landscapes of rippling hills and hurrying rivers. But this lyricism is leavened by keen awareness of the poison flowing through local life: the violence of the B Specials, the sectarianism of unionist-governed Northern Ireland in the decades before the Troubles. Kiely was, after all, writing as early as the 1940s of the grievous impact of partition, and this sharp and glittering political edge was never blunted in his writing.
But there is always appreciation of the accompanying absurdity – as when a local greyhound won the Waterloo Cup, so that in Omagh, “Protestant and Catholic, Orange and Green, rich and poor, marched together, singing and cheering, in that torchlight procession, and [his] father said that it might be the will of God that a greyhound would unite Ireland”.
An appreciation of the quotidian, in place and word and glimpse: this is Benedict Kiely’s legacy, sounding through this excellent collection in bell-clear tones.
Neil Hegarty is a writer and a critic
