Kathleen Kenny
About Kathleen | Two poems: The Accident & Songs | Review
ISBN 978-1-906700-13-3
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Kathleen Kenny is a writer of Irish/Geordie parentage, who lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is employed by Sunderland University as a part-time creative writing lecturer for the Centre for Lifelong Learning.
Reeling between England and Ireland, Keening spans the twentieth century, re-inventing myth and maternal family history; following the escapades of Teresa, the poet's mother, first, as an orphan in Ulster, and later, as a young nun in London, and Italy. The setting then switches to Ireland in the nineteen nineties, where the keening for Teresa's sister, Nellie, takes place.
Returning to England in the twenty-first century, Spittal Tongues intertwines the end of Teresa's long life with the poet's own new beginning.
Kathleen's previous poetry collection, also from Red Squirrel Press, was Firesprung.
The Accident
Hardy as the rain-soaked fields,
Uncle Mick leans on his spade,
to rest his back,
pushes back his worn-out hat,
takes the wet from his forehead
with the cuff of his jacket.
He's ninety-two and wiry as a fence.
Tonight as always
he will take the bike from the shed,
clip back the wide legs
of his Sunday trousers
and pedal to Lizzie Greenan's.
After seeing off a pint,
he will hail his goodnights,
will crunch the red and black bike
through the pebbles of the car park,
before fluttering off like a kite,
a ribbon
midnight blue and singing,
not seeing the last Hilltown bus,
not hearing the fuss
as he is thrown under.
As he bites the dust,
back in the pub, the regulars will discuss
the benefits of work, of keeping fit in old age.
Then they will raise their glasses, toast:
Years from now let's hope that's us.
Long live Mick.
Songs
John began a song,
told us how he found his voice
crossing the Atlantic.
His brother Leonard
never left County Down but sings
in karaokes at the Donard:
Mack the Knife
with his hat on a slant,
jaunty, just like Sinatra.
"The past is a foreign country, wrote LP Hartley. They do things differently there.
"And yet how often we try to smuggle ourselves back across the borders of history and memory.
"Kathleen Kenny's Keening with Spittal Tongues and Tom Kelly's Love-Lines are strong and moving portraits in verse of north-east family life.
"Kenny writes touchingly about the generations of women in her Geordie-Irish family, 'the ones you imagine/in muddled petticoats/and full grey dresses/apple-cheeked/and hot-tempered/running shoeless/in myths of redness.'
"Jarrow-born Kelly writes about the layers of family memory, parents, grand-parents and children, hospitals and funerals, 'the same old story' of unspoken loyalties like a 'loop tape refusing/to snap, spool away.'
"Reading these two books is like looking through someone else's photograph albums containing the complex collective memories and stories, lies and silences that hold a family together.
"'On the one hand there is the common urge to live in the past/when everything was perfect.'
"On the other hand, we sometimes need to 'remember not to remember.'
Andy Croft, Morning Star