A PLACE APART -- INTRO BY JOHN LIDDY

 

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 friends, vivid dreams and their cold realities, domestic distractions and a particular jeu d’esprit that ends with:

                        All I ask is that you remember me –

                        A man of exceptional humility.

 

Substitute the word ‘ability’ for ‘humility’ because ability there is in this collection as the poet explores his ‘place apart’ in the physical that is Limerick, in that ‘place’ he feels at home because ‘this is where I’ve come to rest/this is where my soul’s blessed’. But there is also the ‘place’ where the poet ‘navigates for home –/not a physical place but a spiritual space’, where he explores his strengths in family deaths, nature and painful reminiscence. I am struck by his treatment of the natural world he cohabits and what is gleaned from trips further afield, each poem marked with the precision of the plein-artist.

Memory is the leitmotif of the collection, sparked by the smell of orange peel with that Kavanagh-like ending of ‘sixty Christmases of age’, by the sight of ‘frozen clothes/still hanging on the garden line’, in the ‘thud on the kitchen window’ or Joe Malone’s bohemian pub of the 70s. Remembering is pivotal to the poet’s work and Beville is alert to the faintest spark. It could be an idle guitar or what leaves him ‘choking on the naked truth’. Moments from childhood’s warm nest and early manhood are also recalled and serve to justify the poet’s assertion that it is the duty of the poet to 

Memorialise the miracle of the moment

Not an easy task when one is dealing with the interior; those occasions of heartbreak, regret, love lost and loss of faith, but they are there to be dealt with in poems, acknowledged by the poet when he observes

                        Strange the way crumbs of memories remain to be pecked

A Place Apart is Kieran Beville’s free-verse exploration of aspects of his life, a searching for that ‘place’, both physical and spiritual, a gathering together of confessional and celebratory poems.                                         

John Liddy