Kieran Beville

  Introduction Archaeology , n. the scientific study of the human antiquities, usu. as discovered by excavation. (Chambers Concise 20 th Century Dictionary, 1985). Heart, n. the (imagined) seat of the affections, understanding and thought, as opposed to the head, the seat of reason; courage; vigour (Chambers, ibid). So there’s our brief. With pickaxe, shovel, and broom over our shoulders; a magnifying-glass, pair of tweezers, and small plastic bag (recyclable, of course) in our pocket, we venture forth into this book of poetry to unearth what makes us human. We expect to find buried hordes of affection, amphoras of understanding, and intricate mosaics of thought. Will our digging implements clang onto arrowheads of reason, remnants of courage, or the skeletal remains of vigour? Like all good archaeologists, we prepare ourselves for both treasure, and the sorry reminders of a turbulent past. As poets scrape away at the emotional topsoil with their words and verses, they unc...

  An Appreciation A single poem is its own reward, and can be a kind of solace, a joy, shimmering in one’s memory long afterwards. There is something in us always wants to cling to that faint sliver of times past. Poems like the very ones in Archaeology of the Heart can be words as on a map of one’s life, brightly lit like a jewel-toned jukebox, rising up with a familiar music, and filling one with a longing for love, and for the lost and the found, in which the searing ache of a long-lost love can be discovered in the ardent poem entitled, Separate Rooms – “ Wielded to wound / Listening to the intercourse of wind / And waves. / Tonight it's separate rooms.” Like traditional, honeyed Irish soda bread or dark chocolate truffles suffused with plenty of good Irish whiskey, this charismatic book of poetry you hold in your hands, by Kieran Beville, an esteemed Irish poet, and the reading of the poems inside, is a satisfyingly nourishing, sensual experience to savour, over and over ...

  Introduction Poets are often the mouth-pieces for the silent ones; the true soul-searchers of the world, prodding and probing life around them, filling the empty page with mirror-images of fellow beings and of themselves. But what really sets them apart is their willingness to make poems out of their own suffering, to confess in print what others leave to private thought or prayer. All artists have this in common, yet, it is poets who get to the core of human circumstance by laying themselves bare before the reader with words only the rarest of brush strokes or musical notes can conjure. On this volatile planet, there is much to celebrate and to bemoan, and poets are uniquely placed to throw some light on the conundrum. Kieran Beville opens A Place Apart with the biblical-sounding Forbidden Fruit, a love poem with its direct description of fruit as metaphor for desire, love and longing; themes he returns to throughout the collection. He invites us to wade through homages to...

  Comments by Knute Skinner A prominent subject in Soul Songs is love, which Kieran Beville treats in various ways. In the poem, “A New Day,” we are told that “Though her heart was brittle as dried twigs/ the day brought a blessing to her lips/ when she was woken with a kiss.” But love can lead to disappointment, as is shown vividly in “Discarded Things.” Here the speaker has returned to a house he once shared with his lover. What he finds there are vivid symbols of their time together. There’s a print upon a wall but, more tellingly, he finds a tube of lipstick on the ground “like a spent cartridge/ the bullet of your goodbye still lodged in my chest.” In “First Kiss” the problem is not incompatibility. It is the effects of time: “We are quietly growing old,” says a speaker, but “the stars were within our grasp/ the night of our first kiss.” An especially disquieting view of love appears in “Angel of Death (COVID-19).” Here a victim of the angel pleads that he should be s...

Foreword “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think that you were born that way.” This is a famous quote from the great American novelist and journalist Ernest Hemingway. We all won’t be as successful a writer as the Pulitzer Prize winner, and the man who penned classics like The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom The Bell Tolls , but we can all strive to make sure that we make the best of any talent that we possess. I have no doubt that this book by Kieran Beville will be a great help to aspiring writers who want to get their work published. A visit to any bookshop in any town in Ireland will testify that more and more people are writing books than ever before. Coupled with international best sellers you have nestling in these stores, books by local authors from important local history publications to novels. We are now all better educated than ever before. We read more and have travelled more and have the internet ...

  KIERAN BEVILLE The work is beautifully illustrated by Kathy Tiernan. I'm very thankful to Brian Kirk for his introduction to my second collection of poetry, Soul Songs  (Revival Press, 2020) Introduction Kieran Beville’s second poetry collection Soul Songs begins with a question in the form of the poem Always? The poem itself is a series of questions which culminates with the biggest question of all: ‘What I ask, am I, to do?’ It places the poet and the reader very much in the moment at this particular point in history. Not surprisingly the poet and the collection are very much grounded in the here and now, with poems as up to date as you will find anywhere such as America, You Do Not Own the Moon , written in the wake of the killing by police in Minneapolis of George Floyd, and Angel of Death (Covid-19) written out of the recent and ongoing public health crisis which has impacted on us all. But Beville understands that the present, and therefore any potential future,...

Kieran Beville and John Shinnors Here is the Introduction to my poetry collection, Fool's Gold (Revival Press, 2019) by poet John Liddy. The cover image is by renowned artist, John Shinnors and the work is illustrated by esteemed artist, Kate Hennessy. The collection was described by poet John W. Sexton (who launched the book) as, "Limerick poured out." Certainly a collaborative work! Thanks to all involved. Introduction This is Kieran Beville’s homecoming book of poems with memories of a Limerick childhood, paeans to his mother and father, the young poet’s developing years before branching out into the world where we meet his own family, the pain of separation, his religious and mystical self and the scars of life’s hard lessons prospecting for gold. The poems endure as physical and spiritual signposts on the poet’s journey back to his roots. We are invited in to Beville’s Limerick through MATINÉE AT THE SAVOY, with its cult films of the time, BUTTER DISH, a reminde...