Kieran Beville

Shadowlands is a haunting landscape of love and loss, a mystical journey of remembrance and longing that spans a lifetime and beyond. Each poem—even the darkest--resonates with a vibration of light glimpsed through eyes…like portals-opening into the soul. Indeed, there are a number of references that hint of the poet’s observation, wonder and contemplation from an early age. In the first section: Loss of Innocence: I remember the cottage where I was born Its thick stone walls, and deep-set windows,             Where I sat on rainy days, watching   Contrasting images, “damp coats drying near the fire’’ are repeated much the same as night and day, within and without—life’s countless dualities. Yet upon visiting the graveyard as a boy as revealed in his poem All Soul’s Day everything seems less black and white. Here, there is no distinct separation between life and death…but rather more grey matter befitting a land of s...

Shadowlands, the sixth collection of poetry by Kieran Beville, takes its title from the book and movie about the writer C.S. Lewis, whose book ‘A Grief Observed’, chronicled the psychic pain caused by the death of his wife. Kieran Beville, in these mature poems on the human condition of life and loss, love and grief, has captured the Zeitgeist of our tragic age, with insightful imagery and without any sentimentality. As the poet John Liddy observed about this author’s previous collection, A Place Apart , trawling through memories of meaningful past moments in life is often the leitmotif of Beville’s work. In Shadowlands he addresses such moments under the rubric or methodology of the awareness of loss, in four sections: ‘Loss of Innocence’, ‘Loss in Love’, ‘Loss of Life’, ‘Loss of Humanity’. The book’s striking cover image, ‘Moonlight on the Lake’, taken from the painting by the English Victorian landscape artist John Atkinson, sets a suitably elegant and melancholic atmosphere fo...

  Author’s Preface In his book Shadowlands , C.S. Lewis used the term to describe the human experience of suffering, grief, and the darker aspects of life. The title ‘Shadowlands’ suggests a place where darkness and light coexist, and the book explores themes of loss, love, and the human condition. In my collection of poems, titled, Shadowlands , I explore that mystical realm where the living and the dead overlap or co-exist. Before assembling this collection I realised I had a large and diverse range of unpublished poems but I didn’t want to assemble such a rattle-bag. As I read and re-read the poems it became clear to me that there was (within the complete body of work) an overarching theme for a segment of the work – that of LOSS, and this theme could have four sub categories. First, there were poems about Loss of childhood and moments remembered. We all have these, and I am still astonished at the treasure to be found when excavating that place. As childhood passes t...

  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...