UCD Belfield Metaphysical:
A Retrospective
Kevin Kiely
Lapwing ( 80 pages)
I was pleasantly surprised to
find the first title in the book Researching Venus and Furs and Psychopathia
Sexualis in Kevin Kiely’s retrospective offering which was first published
in 2017. I first came across Kiely’s writing on Facebook only some months ago
and was immediately struck by the lyricism of some of his poetry, and of course
wondered why I had never heard of him before. The opening sentence of Kevin’s Wikipedia
entry clarified things for me however. ‘Kevin Kiely ( born 2 June 1953 ) is
a poet, novelist, critic and playwright whose writings and public statements
have met with controversy.’ This is all I need to know. So, to be very clear,
in this review I am only concerned with the writing of Kevin Kiely as it
appears in his book UCD Belfield Metaphysical: A Retrospective. I
believe that I am perfectly placed to review the book, however belatedly, as I
know next to nothing about the author except what I have read in his Wikipedia
entry which frankly does not say much except that he has won a Fulbright
scholarship in his time and lectured in a number of universities in the states
and has edited a number of publications, writing profusely in many genres.
One of the reasons why I was
so pleasantly surprised at finding the reference to Masoch and Venus in Furs
is that normally it is a reference that most contemporary writers, not too
mention Irish, would run from by a hundred miles, but not so Mr Kiely. Man of
controversy, indeed! So, already my interest was piqued and all of this on the very first page. Of
course, I should justify now why I was so pleasantly surprised to find the name
of Masoch, that bold tatoo printed like a talisman of all that is taboo, and I
will. Subito. Well, firstly, most writers, if not all, are deeply
masochistic individuals, and yet very few at least among men would be ready to admit this. I am
speaking now particularly of poets. When one thinks about it one would imagine
that it would be self-evident, that poets, for the mots part, at least among
men, would be deeply masochistic. And yet, why does one never read anything
about it? There now, there’s a little modern- day conundrum. Of course, this
fact, as fact it is, would in part explain the absolute death of any real
debate in the public forum concerning the poetic art; Sex being a thing, since
the rise of the new found feminism, that has almost disappeared from the realms
of contemporary poetry, at least the stuff that is printed in the so called
established journals. You only have to pronounce the words and you get an idea
of how stuffy and boring contemporary poetry is in the most part. At least the
stuff that gets promoted officially.
You know, I have a theory that
one of the reasons why populism was allowed to become as popular as it did was
because the arts became so emasculated in recent years due to the rise of that
other fascism, yes the other twin pole which has had us all bouncing off the
twin pillars of contemporary society – political correctness! A thought; to be
truly radical these days is to be a moderate. Look at Joe Biden! The voice of
moderation itself in a world that has become so polarised that a mere Tweet
can set it alight.
All of this preamble is quite
pertinent to the present work.
Returning to Masoch, or at
least Kiely’s poem about him, I notice that the poem is made up of thirteen
verse in the form of paragraphs which are more prose then poem, filled with
conjunctions and discourse markers of reason, reason having as much to do with
poetry as a sock has to do with window cleaning, one could say! And, while my
heart kind of dropped, as it has on so many occasions, as one is more often
disappointed in life then not, my fears, which so readily sneaked up on me
after such a promising beginning were then just as quickly dispelled with by
the second poem When the City Becomes Metaphysical I ask the
Question. For, after once again inserting a plethora of determiners,
conjunctions and linkers ( this, and, so, as, and ) in but the first five
lines, I suddenly smiled as I saw what Mr Kiely was up to…He was sailing his
kite on the metaphysics of reason, by justly demanding from it as much as he
could in turn pursue it, so that reason,
by being so duly encumbered, and so exhaustively so, had no other
possible avenue to pursue, but to the actual heavens!
This trick reminded me of
Beckett, and a wonderful essay written about him by the French thinker Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze’s essay L’épuisé (1992) , translated as The Exhausted , is
one of the most illuminating short essays on Beckett’s mammoth incursion into contemporary
consciousness by so singularly pursuing, according to Deleuze, the inexhaustible
permutations of logic and reason and taking them to their ultimate limit;
namely to the point of absolute exhaustion, having tried every single possible
permutation. This is, after all, when you think about it, one of the key
elements of Beckett’s humour. Think about the sequence of the stones in Molloy;
the exchange of hats in Godot, and all the back and forth in the exchanges,
point counter point between particularly the two tramps; the endless variations
of thought and possibility in the novel Watt - a veritable piss-take of
reason, one could say; to the innumerable numerical sequences elucidated in Comment
C’est How It Is…Well, Kevin Kiely knows his Beckett and his Joyce, and
metaphysics is part of the title.
All of this was formulating while
enjoying The Sunflowers now, the third poem in the collection, which
positively flies into quiet lyricism – a poem evoking Van Gogh and Gauguin and
their much celebrated bust up. But, it wasn’t until I turned the page and was
confronted with the fourth The Foyle Flows Softly When She Sings Her Song
that I started smiling like the proverbial Cheshire.
The memorial sky: invasive clouds are too near and
hyphenate
the irises like cat’s eyes entranced: motorways are
stars and
corridors in scales, convoys of traffic are so much
glass, metal and
plastic and in each a phantom ghostly driver plays out
the sonata
of speed and distances
Kiely aligns the statements like
a brickie would bricks in a building site in Kilburn. They pile up and inevitably
form a solid brick wall of poetic statements. Very few poets have the tenacity
of thought to do so, such is Kevin Kiely’s schooling. So, now, somewhat akin to
the passenger who has sunken into the backseat of a taxi on a Friday evening,
giving up all thoughts of control, I sat back and prepared to finally enjoy the
book and the unusual feeling of transportation that it was awakening in me.
Most contemporary poetry, and poets I must admit, bore the pants off me for reasons
already mentioned; I am not interested in their moral qualms, never have been. If
I had of been, I would have returned to church many years ago. I want to be
entertained, teased, and yes Rebecca Elson, sometimes even awed!
As well as intellect, lyricism
is also in quite short supply, it would appear, and yet such is the stuff that
one expects, nay, demands of poets, at least worthy of the name, and all true
poetry. Rightly so, then, poetry is a damn illusive demon. Think about your
life, seriously! How much poetry does it actually contain? Be truthful
now? Well, you see how you’ve answered the question. It’s a rare thing, and
that is how it should be. What then are all those creatures doing on social media
then? Enough said.
So much missing prosaic terza rima sentinel of
the shelves
there is not a bright grain on the photocopy, metaphors
will fit
not fit, lame language, scratches of pen on train
tickets, words on
the dull
White page desktop from pressed keys: through a portal
of silver
fleece the aircraft banks to climb stairs of clouds,
levels off –
the horizon’s walls are lit with streams of leaking
light
the jolt that suggest speed beyond dials. The ache of
longing:
take me away finally from all of this, take me home
from each
day’s lost and found, the sulphur of solitude
The above taken from the title
UCD Belfield Metaphysical. But the book doesn’t really get going until
the section A Map of Melancholy. Everything to date was just a
preparing, a softening up, one could say. At least stylistically. After the
first 4 prose poem sections, blocks of paragraphs deconstructing, or perhaps
more autopsying, the death of a romance; classical masochistic poetic despair,
in short. In other words, the stuff that poets should be writing about, but for
some reason don’t, anymore!
I tell you I have been within her sacred
grove and we shall not be burned like the combustibles
when the
grey smoke of bitumen throbs among the vertebrae of
flames and
the stench of hell, for to be touched by her is
healing and in an
instant all pain, all death, all longing disappears and
in her eyes
and voice is the resolution quest while in her kiss a
true
home emerges for this earth that baffles and astounds,
repels
and yet astonishes in its chant, fix your eyes on her
gaze and this
is easily done ( 4 )
Then ‘Pont de Normande –
6 abandoned attempts in 788 words no
surrender to language poetry’ and something really interesting happens. The
lines now become disjointed, fragmented – Kiely uses punctuation in the spirit
of the modernists, loosely fixated, so that the text on either side of the page
can converge, and poems apparently merge. For example;
TWO:
roadscape hub
bridge She
walked late,
circling cotton sheets drape night’s
sleep
car after car
he followed –
procession of speed
motionless
loins
veiled
spokes
finger -pulse magnetic
Pont de Normandie to her
naked arm
Hub of an Oval Wheel
and proud nippled breasts: Tarot Card.
I must say, I really enjoyed
this section. It reminded me of the early poetry of Kiely’s contemporary Trevor
Joyce, another poet who is habitually consigned to the marginals by the so called
officialdom – who the hell needs the civil service involved in poetry anyway? (
That’s a good joke, by the way!)
But also, I was reminded of
Baudelaire and Proust who both used to live in Honfleur which crops up in the
poem and to whom Kiely is respectful to. Berlin then crops up in reference
to 42, the year when the world held its breath! All so mercifully out of Ireland,
coming up for a bit of air, far away from the incestuous… I mean ancestral…
home.
because I love her to the point of madness
I must accept then what I will
is not always in my grasp, not always
what can be controlled
I can rise higher than the trees
their arms and limbs in choral forests
above the sea cliffs
the depths and deeps of oceans
are floating continental islands
and every country
swaying with the earth’s axis
Keep on climbing Kevin, to the
Metaphysics of the heavens.
Peter O’Neill
November 2020
https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/kevin-kiely
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