Letter From Boston:When he returns to Dublin from Boston in a few weeks' time, Brendan Kennelly will bring back something he never expected, writes Kevin Cullen.
More than 80 poems, more than enough for a new collection.
Three months ago, Kennelly was ensconced as the Burns Scholar in the Center for Irish Programs at Boston College. It's one of those academic sinecures in which writers can more or less do what they want.
Kennelly thought he would teach a little, maybe work on a new version of an old play, but he found muses lurking on Chestnut Hill.
Everything he saw felt new. Every voice triggered memory. Every brightly coloured leaf that fell spoke to him. He started writing in a spiral notebook and couldn't stop.
At 71, Kennelly had an artistic awakening at a time and in a place for which he never planned.
"I have written more in the last three months than I have in the last 20 years," he says, sitting in a sparsely furnished brick house the university has provided him, shaking his head as if even he doesn't believe his sudden prolific burst.
"I didn't plan this. I didn't expect it. I write on impulse and, for some reason, the impulse has been here."
His arrival on the Boston College campus was a big deal. In America he is mentioned in the same breath as Heaney and Muldoon. But after a few dinners and a few receptions, people tend to go back into their own orbits, and, frankly, Kennelly was lonesome. "I understand loneliness," he says. "Feeling a bit lonely here unleashed a flood of poems. I exploited my loneliness."
He found places to sit - a bench in a small garden next to St Mary's Hall, a table at the Hillside Café, where students gather - that brought him a peace he hadn't experienced since sitting in the gardens of Pavia in northern Italy some years ago. He has watched the leaves change to shades he had never seen before. He has gone for walks at four in the morning, when the only noise is the quiet.
Kennelly is a Kerryman by birth if not disposition, and he now understands why the old people in the west of Ireland call Boston "the next parish over".
He met a Boston college professor named James Smith here, got talking, and the two of them figured out that his mother, Bridie, and Smith's grandmother, Josie Kehoe, were sisters who grew up together in Sligo. "We never knew," Kennelly says, amazed.
On Sunday mornings, he goes to the 8 o'clock Mass at the chapel in St Mary's, where 102 Jesuits live.
The chapel has become a regular retreat, at odd times of the day.
"I sit by myself in the darkness," he says, "and I think." He thinks of a farmer in his native Ballylongford who drank away his land. Kennelly was a boy when he bent down to help the farmer, who had fallen.
"No one knows what's going through a man's head," the farmer told him. To this day, those words move him and haunt him.
He thinks about boyhood summers in Sligo. He thinks of people in Ballylongford who grew old in solitude. He thinks of friends long dead.
He remembers the night Brendan Behan debated John B Keane in the Shelbourne to raise money for an orphanage. Behan remained resolutely sober that night and it was a great success. He wishes Behan had lived. He knows why Behan died.
Kennelly has been sober for 21 years, but he could not resist popping into some of Boston's myriad Irish pubs. He nursed bottled water and listened to the accents, the stories, the craic.
"I still miss it," he says of a drinking life he gave up so he could live.
He misses Dubliners more than Dublin. He recalls the old woman who sidled up to him on a sidewalk after his 70th birthday had been noted in the papers. "God bless ye, perfesser," the woman told him in a thick northside accent, "ye don't look a day over 70."
Six years before, a woman with a similar accent and sense of humour approached him after he endured a quadruple heart bypass. She grabbed his forearm, gave it a light squeeze, and assured the poet: "You'll be back to abnormal in no time."
If there is a theme to the poems Kennelly has written in Boston, he says, "it's giving voices to what we think we possess". There are poems about a leaf, a pillow, a hug, a prayer.
"People say prayers as if the prayers are theirs alone," Kennelly says. "They are not."
He sits on a couch, a red tartan scarf around his neck. The afternoon light has faded and the room is almost in complete darkness. There is just enough light left to read, so he does, a poem he calls Prayer. It is the voice of a prayer and it ends like this:
Certain forces work hard to betray me.
I go beyond. There you are. I am your words.
Say me.