Dublin Writers Festival 2010 - 1st to 6th June

Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland’s most distinguished and best loved poets. In this short video he talks about his new collection RESERVOIR VOICES and reads four poems from it, 'Hope', 'Lie', 'Proposal' and 'Peace', plus his classic 'Begin' at the end. This is an excerpt from a film made by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Kennelly's reading at the Abbey Theatre in the Dublin Writers' Festival on 7 June 2009. Much of Brendan Kennelly’s poetry gives voice to others and otherness. Whether through masks or personae, dramatic monologues or riddles, his poems inhabit other lives, other beings and other ways of being in the world. The riddling poems of RESERVOIR VOICES add a further dimension to these explorations, inspired by an autumn sojourn in America where he would sit by the edge of a reservoir, trying to cope with loneliness by contemplating black swans, blue waves, seagulls, trees and rocks. The speaker of each poem is the title. This film is posted with permission from Bloodaxe Books, publishers of RESERVOIR VOICES (2009) and of FAMILIAR STRANGERS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1960-2004 (2004) from which 'Begin' is taken.

Leanne O'Sullivan is a young Irish poet from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. In this short film she reads one poem from her debut collection, 'The Cord' from WAITING FOR MY CLOTHES, followed by five poems from her second collection CAILLEACH: THE HAG OF BEARA: 'Sister', 'Lost', 'Rapture', 'The Dancing Rooms' and 'The Return'. The film shows excerpts from her reading at the Project Arts Centre in the Dublin Writers' Festival on 6 June 2009. 'The Cord' is an early poem, written in her teens, and published by Billy Collins in his anthology POETRY 180: A TURNING BACK TO POETRY (Random House USA, 2003) when Leanne was only 20. An Cailleach Bhéarra, or the Hag of Beara, is a wise woman figure embedded in the physical and mental landscape of western Ireland (and Scotland). The Cailleach’s roots lie in pre-Christian Ireland, and stories of her relationship with that rugged landscape and culture still abound. Central to these narratives is the story of her love affair with a sea god. A large stone rests on the ridge overlooking Ballycrovane Harbour, and it is said to be the petrified body of the Cailleach; she has had several lives, beginning each life with a birth from her stony form – and returning to stone at the end. The supernatural and superhuman feature strongly in traditional stories of the Cailleach (pronounced Ca-lock or Cay-luck) – feats such as her creating mountains or leaping vast distances that place the tales firmly into the world of myth. While still recognising the Cailleach as a figure of extraordinary power and influence, Leanne O’Sullivan’s poems explore the human origins from which the legend grew. She still forms the landscape, yet at the same time is intrinsically part of it, close to it, rather than gigantically above it; and her husband is not the sea god of legend, but a fisherman. And for all her strength, she is vulnerable. This film is posted with permission from Bloodaxe Books, publishers of WAITING FOR MY CLOTHES (2004) and CAILLEACH (2009).