Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Kennelly followed his shocking epic poem Cromwell with the even more notorious Book of Judas, which topped the Irish bestsellers list. This new piece of mischief out-Judases Cromwell, sinking its teeth into the pants of poetry itself. Here, the author plays devil's advocate, exploring the 'poetryworlds' of one Ace de Horner who is slowly going blind. Helped by his uglyjoe dog, Kanooce, and by a woman, Janey Mary, Ace thinks he is connecting the fragments of his life a little more convincingly. Not so! As the poem digs into Ace's vanity, visions, fantasies, failures, dedication and absurdity, the reader is aware of Ace's frustration in his efforts to relate to poetry, to his jocular distortions of language and to his pained perspective on the world.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

Kennelly calls this "a riotous epic poem," and that it certainly is. While others of his generation of Irish poets are complacently selecting for their Selecteds and collecting for their Collecteds , Kennelly is charging ahead again in a sequence--if one can use so diminutive a term for a 350-page book with at least that many poems in it--that builds on his last two books. Whereas Cromwell (1983) brought us the chillingly banal inner world of its eponymous antihero, and The Book of Judas (1991) found vestiges of its title character in the acts of each of us, Poetry My Arse centers on a crafty but failed Dublin poet by the name of Ace de Horner. Or does it? In a brilliant introductory essay, Kennelly enjoins us to remember that Dublin itself has been a character in many Irish works, and so it is here. Kennelly's Dublin is a postcolonialist's dream (or nightmare)--incestuous, gossip mongering, deceitful, and vibrant with life. Through it, Ace and his playmate Janey Mary (a "vulgar bitch with a tongue on her like a slurrypit" ) travel with "guilt complexes on flexi-time," making love and poetry. Not since Joyce has an Irish author so captured the soul of Dublin and thereby of Ireland. (Reviewed March 15, 1996)1852243228Patricia Monaghan

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland's most distinguished and best loved poets, as well as a renowned teacher and cultural commentator. Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, he was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for over 30 years, and retired from teaching in 2005. He now lives in Listowel, Co. Kerry. He has published more than 30 books of poetry, including Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 (2004), which includes the whole of his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain (1998). He is best-known for two controversial poetry books, Cromwell, published in Ireland in 1983 and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 1987, and his epic poem The Book of Judas (1991), which topped the Irish bestsellers list: a shorter version was published by Bloodaxe in 2002 as The Little Book of Judas. His third epic, Poetry My Arse (1995), did much to outdo these in notoriety. All these remain available separately from Bloodaxe, along with his more recent titles: Glimpses (2001), Martial Art (2003), Now (2006), Reservoir Voices (2009), The Essential Brendan Kennelly: Selected Poems, edited by Terence Brown and Michael Longley, with audio CD (2011), and Guff (2013). His Journey into Joy: Selected Prose, edited by Åke Persson, was published by Bloodaxe in 1994, along with Dark Fathers into Light, a critical anthology on his work edited by Richard Pine. John McDonagh's critical study Brendan Kennelly: A Host of Ghosts was published in The Liffey Press's Contemporary Irish Writers series in 2004.