Limerick lauded by poet laureate

‘A Place Apart’ (Revival Press) is Kieran Beville’s latest collection of poems. In this work the author writes in confessional mode. He centres on and is insightful about the self. It would be misleading to think that confessional poets are simply wailing into the void as they are working within the constraints of poetry. Mostly in an autobiographical manner, these poems pry open the distresses unbalancing his inner life.

There are lyric poems of love like ‘Bouquet’, an extended analogy of love offered as a bouquet of colourful flowers with the exhortation to accept it ‘before the wind and frost lay bare/ the colour of this world you made/ in the sunshine of your care.’

A poem of loss and heart-break such as Requiem presents a series of postcards from the autobiographical self.

For poems about creativity read Hatching and Manna for the Mind they propose apparently different sources of inspiration. Hatching links ideas stimulated by observing nature:

Brooding over the page,

incubating embryonic thoughts,

words are hatching

hungry to be fed

with wriggling rhythms.

While in Manna for the Mind he ‘sometimes strays into the spirit world/ through a portal of the mind. / There I sit still and silent/ waiting...’ In both instances, the inspiration for poems comes mysteriously, confirming what Muldoon says: “If a poem doesn't come from the 'somewhere else' it's not worth reading or writing in the first place.”

The idea of being and belonging is confidently asserted in his poem Limerick which is his homage to the City. The poem gathers a momentum of praise in the regularity of its rhyme and in the balancing lines. It begins with, ‘City of bridges and steeples’ and goes on to describe its historical, architectural and cultural heritage:

Confraternity of dockers and doctors

Clash of the ash, smack of sliotar

Cauldron of rugby and our pub culture.

Its ancient walls, broad and strong.

The people’s hearts full of song!

The poem concludes with the couplet of recognition and the sense of belonging:

This is where I’ve come to rest / this is where my soul is blessed.

This collection pries open the poet's inner self for the world to see and reading the poems is equally revealing for the reader, too, who becomes a part of this examined life. ‘A Place Apart’ is available in Mahoney’s Bookshop or online at https://limerickwriterscentre.com/product/a-place-apart/

-Anton Floyd is a West Cork based poet