Brendan Kennelly is retiring next year, but the publication of his new and collected poems shows he has no intention of hanging up his pen, he tells Arminta Wallace
He has the instinctive timing of the great storyteller. Halfway across Front Square in Trinity College, he stops suddenly and - apropos of nothing much at all - recalls the rough praise the farmers of his Kerry youth would bestow on a lad possessed of a certain level of footballing skill. "And they'd do this to you . . ." He rubs his hand vigorously around and around the top of his head, with complete disregard for the result of this action on the state of his already dishevelled hair. While we are still laughing he stops once more, executes an inch-perfect impersonation of a po-faced professor of English waffling on about something to do with Shakespeare - and follows it with a smile as sweetly innocent as sunshine after rain.
Such is a conversation with Brendan Kennelly. It's like wandering, mapless, around a city whose streets you know only from paintings or the telly. At odd moments, things acquire an extra dimension or strike a strangely familiar chord.
Such, too, is the experience of reading his New and Collected Poems 1960-2004 - an impressively chunky tome which runs to some 500 pages - and hence its title, Familiar Strangers. The poems are arranged, not in chronological order as the reader of a collection might be entitled to expect, but thematically, in sections with evocative titles of their own: 'Lifting the moon', 'Questioning answers', 'Guff and muscle'.
We are seated in a room in the English Department in Trinity. Despite his impending retirement as Professor of Modern Literature, Kennelly has been obliged to put up a notice which reads "Office unattended" to keep his students at bay for the duration of our interview. "They'll knock anyway," he says. (They do.) Back to Familiar Strangers, he nods, as if expecting the question about its structure. "Looking back over the poems I've tried to write," he explains, "they all seemed to be moments, or stabs of memory, or sudden images, and seemed independent of chronological time. Just moments that commanded me to write down my father's face, or my mother's words - or her hands - or something in the village, or something in Dublin. As the years went by I saw that some of the images kept recurring, and some connected. That was my time, so to speak. Connection. Connection is everything."
The idea for the collection came, says Kennelly, from his English publisher, Bloodaxe Books. But the idea of the thematic sections was his own. "I thought it was an interesting experiment, to try to be truthful to the way your imagination works. Because individual imaginations work in the most extraordinary ways - and we share very little of it with each other.
"That's one of the things I love about Molly Bloom and Leopold. They have two minds. Everyone in Ireland has two minds. Everyone. There's the one that's yapping away, like . . . and then there's the one that's at the back of the head somewhere. I love that phrase where she's thinking about him and she says 'well as well him as another' . . . It's at the back of people's heads." The reference to Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique is accidental, but apt.
A similar dynamic is at work in Familiar Strangers: echoes, hints, a line of thought, a startling change of gear. A sequence of poems about women includes 'Actaeon', a retelling of the Greek myth in which the goddess Diana turns a young man into a stag; 'The Hope of Wings', a description of a bird being cleaned after an oil spill; 'A Great Day', a portrait of a wedding; and 'Moloney Discovers The Winter', a story of lost love in the depths of rural Ireland.
Then comes 'The Dose': "Strip her./ Whip her through the town./Fling her into the river/From the bridge in Portadown . . ." For the reader who is unfamiliar with Kennelly's book Cromwell, the violence comes as a shock - the sort of shock which would never have been delivered if 'The Dose' had been part of a section neatly labelled 'From Cromwell, 1983'. It is a sort of gentle reshuffling of Kennelly's most celebrated - or controversial, depending on your point of view - works: 1991's The Book of Judas, Poetry My Arse from 1995, The Man Made of Rain, written in 1998 after he survived major heart surgery, with collections that date from the 1960s, and poems, as the introduction has it, "previously uncollected".
Was it painful for the poet, this process of revisiting his life through his poems? Kennelly's voice grows quiet. "It was. It blew my head, because I had to read things - my parents' deaths, my brother's death, the alcoholism, the failed marriage - all that, you know. And you do really relive things if the images are strong; the window in the kitchen, the colour of the curtains. You're in the moment. But you remember great moments too."
One less-than-great moment was the day when, following the publication of The Book of Judas, a man accosted Kennelly just across the road from Trinity and told him he "should be hung". He smiles ruefully. "But in a way, the period of alcoholism was maybe the roughest," he says. "Because you kind of lose yourself. You think it's great, but it's . . ." He hesitates, searching for the words. "It's a time of . . ." Another uncharacteristic pause. "It's," he finally declares, "self-deception masquerading as adventure." Kennelly insists he was lucky in the support he received from his colleagues - especially the provost of Trinity at the time, Provost Watts - and from the people he encountered at St Patrick's Hospital, both from doctors such as John Cooney and Anthony Clare, and from fellow patients whose coping helped him cope too.
But it hasn't been easy. "It's 18 years now," he says, "and sometimes I get such a longing for it. Oh, Jesus. Fierce. About three times a year I actually break out sweating - pouring it. So I have a wash in cold water, and go for a walk. It's a choice, as a lot of things are. Even though you feel bound and fascinated, you can actually release yourself."
What of those recurring images he referred to earlier? "I would probably say father and mother. The love of fields and streets. The love of characters - telling stories, singing songs. The love of strange words coming out of their mouths. A man talking about why work is a disaster for humanity. He says, 'Work interferes with a man's day, and you should be very careful how you deal with it'. He was talking away to himself inside in the pub. Sipping his pint. Ruminating." He throws back his head and laughs. "I am a fairly good worker, but he has given me a sense of ambiguity about it that I've never lost.
"And then I love athletes, swimmers, footballers. I love the idea of doing your best at anything - stretching yourself. Because I was surrounded by brothers - footballers, bright young men, but bigger fellows, always able to sit on me - I think I became a kind of a watcher. Looking at them; looking at people. Although," he adds, "I enjoyed playing, too. I played in an all-Ireland against Dublin 50 years ago. Lost it for Kerry. To this day, when I go home, some of the lads - the older gentlemen - say; 'Aren't you the little boy that lost the all-Ireland for Kerry?' " Another bout of laughter. "No mercy."
Biographies of Kennelly inevitably begin with the words "Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co Kerry. . ." But he actually left the county in his teens and has spent half a century in Dublin. "I came to Trinity in 1953, and apart from a couple of years in ESB I've been here ever since - and enjoyed it. Yes, enjoyed it. I think I've been in three villages. I was reared in a Kerry village. I moved to an academic village. And Dublin I always see as a village - the gossip, the jokes, the names scrawled on the walls everywhere you go. To me that's the history of Ireland."
His poetry gives equal weight to the majesty of the Kerry mountains and the dinginess of Dublin streets. "Street corners are interesting too. I think Roddy Doyle is very good at that - showing the appeal, the mesmerism of small corners. Dublin kids love those corners. A small little field, a patch of grass, the place where you have your first fight. The reason soccer really takes off in cities is because of the smallness of the corners. The skills of soccer are the skills of small places. I see city kids playing soccer and they bring the ball up their leg, flick it over . . . in the country you try to kick the ball over to the other side of a long field. So you develop a long kick."
Kennelly is something of an expert on Dublin streets, for walking them is another of his obsessions. "I do four or five miles a day, if I'm in good form. It does something, not just to your legs and your body and your back, but to your sense of rhythm. If you have an idea it gets clear. I see walking as education: a kind of surprise, excitement, an opening of your mind. It could be from reading Wordsworth or from walking through Killarney Street."
But still. Killarney Street. It doesn't have the elevation of Mangerton Mountain - does it? "No, it doesn't. It's different. But then, that's reflected in the talk. Dublin talk is different. It's quicker than Kerry talk. It has a rightness, a precision - and a lethal, stabbing quality. To this day you can see Joyce's ludic genius at work in Dublin. People play with words, and they allow words to play with them. That's so important - not to be mastering language all the time, but to play with it."
The element of play is, says Kennelly, central to his work as a poet. The idea of poetry as gossip. "We delight in gossip. You can hear things from children, or drinkers, or beggars, or loners, that are thrilling - just thrilling. And in Ireland people don't talk about the book. They talk about 'Yer man'." He grins. There'll be plenty to say about yer man Kennelly when this book appears. Looking back, has his view of poetry changed over the years? "I think in certain ways it has - but in other ways it hasn't. It does involve the collaboration of opposites. Think of that marvellous line of Frank O Connor's: 'Celebrate the darkness and the shame.' You don't celebrate shame, but I think poetry does - or it can."
Which is not to say that poetry can't deal with terrible things. "In Cromwell, for example, I was dealing with something terrible. Hatred, and absence of dialogue, and how easy hatred is. But if you find out enough about a person, you're bound to find things that you like. I remember reading through five volumes of Cromwell's letters, edited by Macauley, the historian; and I found out he was a good farmer, and a republican, and sensible. As well as a mad slaughterer. So I tried to present that in the form of a dialogue. This is my idea of celebration - to step outside yourself and find a sympathetic, intelligent place for somebody that you were trained to hate. And that works for yourself as well. The place that you would condemn in yourself. You should give it a voice. You should express your own darkness."
Although his first poems were published, together with those of Rudi Holzapfel, by Dolmen Press in 1959, Kennelly describes himself as "essentially a beginner". The final poem in this collection, he notes with satisfaction, is called 'Begin'. So, despite this mammoth celebration of a lifetime's work, we can safely asume that Kennelly isn't about to hang up his pen? He chortles at the idea of it. "No. I'd love to express . . ."
He tilts his head to one side like a bird, and he's off, flying on another virtuoso verbal tangent. "What is learning? Education's an amazing thing. It develops some, and it shrivels others. I like the idea of the fella that said, 'Education is what remains when books have been forgotten'. That's what I'd love to inquire into. What is it? These little words, you know? What is anything? Why does it happen? Learning. I've been at it for 64 years now. And even if - at 64 - I wrote an enlightening sentence for somebody who is 10 - or 30 - I'd be happy."
Familiar Strangers by Brendan Kennelly is published by Bloodaxe Books (£12)