Why do we not want our poets to do Toyota commercials? Think straight. Why do we not want our poets to have day jobs, to make money, to play happy families? Is there something in us that demands our writers die for and in their own words? Is the price of our immortal praise that they hang from a cross of their choice? Drugs? Alcohol? Exile? As close to the age of 33 as possible?
Last week I was in Paris doing some work and by complete coincidence I found myself in the hotel where Oscar Wilde (swollen with syphilitic gases) exploded all over his room. "I'm dying beyond my means," he had said. "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." They both went.
Irish writers seem programmed for self destruction, the blood sacrifice is as central a conceit to our literature as it is in our politics. The Jesus Complex. Now Brendan Kennelly is a different kind of fish. Here we get the feeling of a poet who has played with the demons of Irish literature but is stepping back from the edge, looking around, discovering he loves his life too much to live the Myth. Here in an epic poem of twelve parts he rather dismantles it, taking Wilde's idea that "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he will tell you the truth". He chooses Judas ...

"If I can imagine you, I may well be you.
Or it may be that you are me".

The Book Of Judas (Bloodaxe Books -£9.95IR) is an epic achievement and as over the top as the subject deserves. This is a poetry as base as heavy metal, as high as the Holy Spirit flies, comic and tragic, from litany to rant, roaring at times, soaring at other times. Like David in the Psalms, like Robert Johnson in the blues, the poet scratches out Screwtape letters to a God who may or may not have abandoned him, and of course to anyone else who is listening. He takes risks, he gets diverted, but whatever the twist, all roads seem to end at the same religious gate, locked tight with the idea that "things are not what they should be". His response: 'the best way to serve the age is to betray it', as vivid a tattoo as any rock 'n' roller could ask for.
And what of Kennelly's age, our time? We as Pilate have presided over the death of Marxist/Leninism and the failure to revive the Judaeo-Christian alternative. What's left to betray? ...
Religion as antagonist, that ould crutch of Irish writing, is not enough for someone as smart as Brendan Kennelly. As a rebel his five smooth stones are kept for much less obvious Goliaths than Catholic guilt or political gridlock. He knows that with less than 10 years to go, the 20th century has left Judas/Kennelly with no-one to blame ... but himself that is.

"If I'd made the world I'd keep my mouth shut too.
Especially if I'd made me ..."

This is not self-loathing. In poems like Spirit Fuck and Abraham's Bosom he is bold, but whether Kennelly fears God or not, he is certainly not afraid to approach HIM. Perhaps that is why he feels so comfortable around his chosen location and his subject's subject matter. If not exactly stained glass windows, he has found in Christianity a parade of colours, a vat of symbolism, ceremonies and rituals that take on new meaning when juxtaposed with the cruel mundanity of the real world; Cork, Dublin, Trinity College... well nearly the real world. He has, in Irish literary terms, revisited the scene of the crime, remade Jesus in his own image and collated a very different book of evidence. He lets us watch as he stands bowlegged at a crossroads in time and culture, playing stretch with knives of fear and faith, irony and soul, the fist of vision, the hard-nose of reality.
If most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people (Adrian Mitchell), this is not true of Kennelly's work. He makes his subject accessible;

"Did He ever fish for eels
And watch them die at his feet.
Wriggling like love in the dust.
Gospels, your incomplete".

It's not all lyricism. The cardinal reds and royal blues of earlier work harshly contrasted by the dull greys and shit browns of a place we recognise. I prefer the headiness of "A Dream Of Yellow Rain" balanced by the pink skin pornographic detail of poems like "Here Is Monica Now" or "Stains". He is thank God, as mesmerised by the ordinary world as the extraordinary things we are doing to it. Even if his "lips" betray him;

"When I see trout flashing through water.
They close in wonder.
When my blood is chill with anger.
They are po-faced diplo-mats.
When I see pictures that make heaven a possibility.
They ooze platitudes like spittle.
Then I see precision bombers at work.
They suck horror like mother's milk."

Over eight years the pilgrim progresses through 400 poems (I heard there were 800), only occasionally crossing the borders of embarrassment in a medium frequently even more indulgent than rock and roll.
An academic, he has broken his own code of class reference, the pratspeak that throws a ring around poetry and that I might have to watch right here ... It is and it isn't a long way from rock and roll. Here are some of the things which as a songwriter make me jealous of the poet; a vocabulary that includes half-assed, catechism, insurance company and tea bag (it would take me the next ten years to get tea bag into a song). There's his humour; his description of Marilyn Monroe as shining like "a freshly polished granny smith apple/before avid human fangs bit into it" ... I love "God As An Unmarried Mother" ... In one poem he has Brendan Behan at the last supper, in another the holy meal is interrupted by a bomb scare. Then again ...

"God is a bomb.
To get the best results, handle carefully.
Time properly, choose a fruitful place.
Where you can turn murder into martyrdom".

I prefer...

"There's only one way to treat God.
Walk up to him and kiss him.
He appreciates the direct approach.
Mess around you'll miss him."

I love this book, I've had it with me now for twenty chaotic, dizzy days, in Dublin, Paris and Morocco making a video. Here with more than just excess baggage and a most unholy family the words of this Irish poet made strange sense, words like eyes finding us out as we got lost in the dark, dank streets of Fez. Its dark passageways, its cackles of laughter, its call to prayer, its opium faces all conspired to make the labyrinthine journey of this book visible. Its mad juxtaposition of past/present. Ireland/Middle East plausible even. In more than just my own mind there will always be a smell off this tomb of a book. I hope I am not getting off the point, there is light here, bright white light, but if you do find Jesus, you know Judas is just 'round the corner and he knows ... it's got to be-e-e perfect!