Poetry

Breakfast with Sylvia
Lagan Press, Belfast 2005

"Kiely jolts us into another dimension of language, where speech is worked like molten metal, throwing off sparks, illusions, memories and experiences...Yet through the pyrotechnics shines the cool winter light of Donegal."

Barbara Ellis Iota (London 2006)

"Lyrical, original, faithful to the moment and its joys but with an undertone of sometimes rueful experience - these are the poems of a man who has come through."
Anthony Cronin

"Kevin Kiely's writing shows the world alive, in a bracing air, in a sharp light, where a subject is probed and rattled by an Atlantic energy. These poems are full of edgily real things, people and places caught in a sudden urgent perspective that shakes the reader with their nearness. A poem such as "On a deserted beach with a Sony Walkman", succeeds in doing this simultaneously with the material world and with emotions and ideas about art. Poems on erotic themes are incandescent and stormy with an intellectual bite to them. There is nothing glum or staid here and much that is invigorating to read." Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

"There's an intriguing mixture of themes and tones in Kevin Kiely's new collection. The mythic mingles with the realistic, the spiritual touches the material world, the robust sexuality of many of the poems lies side by side with moments of delicate reticence. There's an energetic awareness of, and participation in, the joy of being. These poems are open and passionate, adventurous and daring. Taken together, they create a world of their own. Readers will enjoy exploring this world so convincingly shaped by Kevin Kiely."
Brendan Kennelly

To Conjure Up, Breakfast with Sylvia (from Breakfast with Sylvia)

Hymn to Aphrodite (from Plainchant for a Sundering)



To Conjure Up

I went absent leaving you for Chicago
The hotel became a hospital
I signed my committal form at reception

At the Sears Tower in the elevator,
A silver walled room, powered by jet engines
Thrust me with strangers to the 110th floor

From this height through the windows - the lights
In the towers of the city, the moving lights
Of traffic and street lights still, far below.

A snowy cloud passed across the window, dimming
The scene of the black and the lights and the towers
With you missing I could only conjure you up.
And then I said: I will give you all of this city

Below us from this mad height if you bow down
And adore me. I bow down and adore you by the waters
of Lake Michigan breaking and breaking in waves without salt

And she said: I will bow down and adore you.
So I gave her the city
With pleasure I gave her the city of Chicago
 

Breakfast with Sylvia Plath

1.
in Café Insomnia, anaemic sunlight
traffic outside
the rain flecked picture window
sizzling bacon, eggs wide eyed
frying on the gas
 
the face by turns, almond pale and fire bright
a streak of lip paint on the brilliant teeth
she eyes the menu in a seething force-nine rage
her conversation post modern in its tangled sense

... bad dreams about a hare
run over by a Morris estate wagon
driven by Edward Hughes
his Meinkampf look (his cock runneth over)
the car with a split screen
two steering wheels, one for her father, Otto
who skinned a rat in front of his students
cooked, and ate it
I won't mention that awful weevil of a woman
I will never speak to God again
 
Edward Hughes should have
scratched on my tombstone:
it was a fight to the death
she or I
had to die
something of me died with her.
 
2.
Sivvy ordered
from the tightly clenched menu
pointing with a bandaged thumb
 
two glasses of milk and bread
nothing else, thank you
the waitress moved off
 
other tables were served hot food
but the bee keeper's daughter
shrill in convulsive chatter
shaken through the air
crackling with blue light
her bones almost wrenched from the muscles
as if, at any moment the jelly would spill out
 
fingered a piece of bread,
but did not eat, her milk untouched
then another mood swing:
I lost an overcoat and keys
but I had a spare set
I sucked but not for long
the sweet and sickly atmosphere
of 23 Fitzroy Road, London NW1
 
on the wall
outside the front door
a blue plaque to W. B. Yeats
which I knew
was mine too
when I became Christ and Keats
 
place a dozen yellow roses
in the empty oven, door open
towel inside for a pillow
 
O my children

Hymn to Aphrodite

The seaweed in your golden arch is another delicacy
these pillars and spheres, the bowl of womanhood
its socketless eye a lone star

Far off the grapes mounted in the little moons
give me seafood at will
that I can live off the lap of luxury, explore the
sunlit cave where wave upon wave presses your
wine down the halls of my ears

I walk barefoot and climb your neck with my tongue

and come up again and again to behold the eyes

half-open inward gazing

Then your back is a meadow stretching towards trees
your arms come down at dawn in clouds with fingers
of rain coiling

Take me in once more where evening and morning

are lost forever and time stops

the world dissolves into the magic at the glimpsed

heart of things and the earth is swallowed in the rings of Saturn

Let it all go or end but no more the lost way

the way down the insane streets

Let it all come back
to your kisses in the present and future

and great pain and unspeakable loss find an answer