Touch of the poet at Knockninny
Sunday June 24 2007
COUNTRY MATTERS:
PJ KENNEDY (no relation) is a poet of whom not too many people may have heard. He is a farmer who writes in a tradition of Ledwidge or McGahern, writers who have celebrated the landscape and the people who live in rural backwaters. Some of his admirers say he is emerging as a latter-day Kavanagh. PJ himself, a retiring fellow, would be alarmed at such comparisons.
He comes from the same part of Ireland as McGahern, and he has recorded in some arresting verse some observations of life in small farming communities in Leitrim and Cavan which is his native heath.
Consider this from a poem called Cured about an ailing cow, mother of twin calves, and suffering from mastitis: "I caught her dewless nose with the Siberian cold tongs. She moaned as if to say 'Ah, go easy'." After administrations of medicine "I covered her with a blanket/ Blue plastic baling twine for the belly band."
It goes on: "I bathed her sore udder with lukewarm water./ Before nightfall a paste of goose-seam was applied. Big Snowy slept."
A Kavanagh touch?
There are many in rural parts who will appreciate these sentiments and, indeed, have some practical knowledge of such matters. Here, then, is the wrap-up: "I went to see her./ When I entered the byre she rose to meet me/ Sure and strong like Knockninny Rock./ She stretched herself gracefully/ A good healthy sign like a person yawning."
PJ farms just over 100 acres near Belturbet, handed down in his family through generations. He began his working life away from the farm as a motor mechanic but returned to take over after his father's time. Then there was some dairying, but times change, and today he has sheep and some suckler cows. There are about 50 acres of forestry.
He has been an enthusiast for Listowel Writers' Week for some years, participating with other rhymsters at the poets' corner in the Kingdom Bar, a nightly event hosted by George Rowley, where people get up and recite their verses, or those of others, or sing their songs. This year saw the publication of PJ's first modest book of poems called Shadows on Our Doorstep by a small imprint called originalwriting.ie/bookshop and, so far, with public launchings in Kerry and Cavan, it has been sold out. Last week, he had to drive to Dublin to get more copies after 500 people turned up at a function near his homeplace.
PJ does not spend all his time tending to the requirements of sheep and cattle and some years back embarked on third-level studies in Enniskillen and the Open University. Tutors told him his history and environment essays had a poetic touch; one piece of work was praised as being "full of poetry".
The writer Michael Harding, conducting a local authority course in Cavan, helped set the muse bubbling with an instruction to write a poem about a teapot! Here is some of His Teapot. The setting is a wake. "The drained aluminium teapot/ Waited at the edge/ Of the Stanley 8 range./ From work, the once bright frame/ Was bruised, contorted,/ The lid bald without its bakelite crown./ The vent long stuffed/ Its spout running slow/ An old artery closing down."
Neighbours had gathered in the kitchen. One boy eyed the pot. "A youngster spoke, 'You'd think he'd be back/ In a few minutes'."
There are 30 poems in this little book about byres, beds, bogs and bicycles, weather, townlands, candlesticks and a council pump which wagged its cow-tail handle and served people's needs until "robbers hacked the flange nuts and the ligament./ Only stumps of bare bolts remain."
I somehow feel the distinguished Dr Heaney might enjoy these verses.
