Brigit Pegeen Kelly published three books of poetry: To the Place of Trumpets (1988), selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, Song (1995), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Orchard (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Kelly was awarded a "Discovery" / The Nation award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2008 Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. Her work appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines, including The Nation, The Yale Review, New England Review, Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, five Pushcart Prize volumes, and six volumes of The Best American Poetry. For many years Kelly taught as a professor of English at the University of Illinois. She previously taught at the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, Warren Wilson College, and numerous writers' conferences. In 2002 the University of Illinois awarded her both humanities and campus-wide awards for excellence in teaching. She passed away in 2016.
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SongPoemsFrom"Arguments of Everlasting"
My mother
gathers gladiolas. The gladness
is fractured. As when
the globe with its thousand mirrors
cracked the light. How
it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives
and the show of light
they shot around us: so that
down the dark hall the ghosts danced
with us: down the dark hall
the broken angels.
Song :Poems -
SongPoemsFrom"Pipistrelles"
We are not birds. Despite our walls covered
With winged men, we are not birds.
And all that is birdlike in the bats
Is also deception. They have
No feathers, no beak, no high-pitched heart.
Their wings are skin. Skin! Stretched
From shoulder to foot like the cloth
We nailed to wood to build
Our doomed medieval contraptions for flight.
Or like our taut sheets, the high-strung skin,
The great single wing of sex we lean on
But we are not birds. All that is birdlike
In us, in the bats, is illusion.
There is nothing at all of the bird in us…
Except for flight. Except for flight.
Song :Poems -
SongPoemsFrom"The Witnesses"
The Witnesses come again. They come to my mind
Before they come to the door. The young man wears a red scarf.
And the old woman is soft in the head. We sit on the porch
And she fans the waves painted on the Watchtower’s cover.
The waves are blue as rebellion. “The ocean,” she says,
“See here…the ocean…the ocean is full of dirt…
And it is going…” And she is gone. Stares blindly
At the spot where two drab deer made the baby laugh
By eating dead bushes. He thought they were cows. “Moo,”
He said. “Moooo.” He names things by their sounds.
The young Witness picks up the dropped conversation,
He plies a soft black book. Is pledged to persuasion.
Once he was a Papist, but now he is not. He frowns
At the statue of Mary covered with bird lime. “The signs
Will come,” he says. “The signs, and then the End.
Only the chosen will stand.” My mind lies quiet.
Song :Poems
"Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of the very best poets now writing in the United States. In fact, there is no one who is any better. Not only are her poems brilliantly made, but they also give great pleasure. Rarely are those two qualities seen together in one poet, but in Kelly's work, especially in her new book, The Orchard, it happens again and again. For a lover of poetry, the result is pure exhilaration." —Stephen Dobyns
" . . . Her poems are like no one else’s—hard and luminous, weird in the sense of making a thing strange that we at last might see it, poems that from book to book show a strength that flexes itself, both formally and in terms of content, in ways that continue to, at equal turns, teach and surprise." —American Poet [on The Orchard]
"Kelly has a talent for coaxing out the world's ghosts and then fixing them in personal landscapes of fear and uncertainty . . . Smoothed by nuances of sound and rhythm, her poems exude an ambiguous wisdom, an acceptance of the sad magic that returns us constantly to the lives we might have led." —Library Journal [on Song]
"Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poems suggest a kind of folk art—their clay washed of narrative grit, serviceably turned and fancifully decorated, fired, then filled at the creative instinct's oldest well. It is a pleasure to drink from this fine local pottery." —James Merrill, judge of the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets [on To the Place of the Trumpets]
