Brendan Kennelly The Essential

[Autom. eng. transl.] The volume is the first Italian translation of Brendan Kennelly's poetic work (Ballylongford, Ireland, 1936 -). Kennelly is a poet, essayist and novelist and until 2005 he was Full Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, an institution that awarded him the title of Professor Emeritus and named him a Chair Professor. A very prolific author, he has more than twenty volumes of poems, many of which have come together in the latest prestigious collection curated by two illustrious scholars, the critic Terence Brown and the poet Michael Longley: “The Essential Brendan Kennelly. Selected Poems ", (Bloodaxe 2011). The Italian edition has added some out-of-collection poetic texts considered fundamental to introduce the author to the Italian public; these are poems which the author in turn translated into English from the original in Irish Gaelic. The volume also contains: a preface by the illustrious poet and anglist Tomaso Kemeny; a contribution by Michael Higgins, President of the Republic of Ireland as well as a well-known poet himself; a contribution from Bono U2; a critical essay of mine; Note. My essay analyzes the poetics of Brendan Kennelly's work with particular reference to his poetic production but also to that in prose. Through the choice of the poems collected in the anthology "The Essential", it follows the chronological path that leads the poet to arrive - from an initial phase of excess of lyrical expression - to the final phase of a poetic economy based on the martial epigrammatic model. Despite the substantial simplicity of the meters used (ballads, sonnets, epigrams), Kennelly's corpus reflects a profound complexity of relationships between form and content. It ranges from completely rhyming poems (Begin) to rigorously shaped poems (My Dark Fathers). The oscillation is not accidental, given the inevitable relationship between metric trend and verbal discourse and the suggestive function of rhyming patterns.