Fool's Gold

By Kieran Beville

Kieran Beville's homecoming poetry book with memories of a Limerick childhood, paeans to his mother and father, his developing years before branching out into the world where we meet his family, the pain of separation, his religious and mystical self and scars of life’s hard lessons prospecting for gold. The poems endure as physical and spiritual signposts on the poet’s journey back to his roots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Jan 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463276549

Kieran Beville

Kieran Beville is author of Write Now – A Practical Guide to Becoming a Writer (Limerick Writers' Centre, 2019). He has had a substantial number of poems and articles published in various newspapers, journals and magazines and four collections of poetry (Revival Press). His book, Pulling Back the Clouds is a short biography of Mike Kelly, collector of the die-cast model aircraft display at Shannon Airport (LWC, 2020). In 2022 Beville was appointed Ollamh (Poet Laureate) for Limerick.

Book preview

This is Kieran Beville’s homecoming book of poems with memories of a Limerick childhood, paeans to his mother and father, the young poet’s developing years before branching out into the world where we meet his own family, the pain of separation, his religious and mystical self and the scars of life’s hard lessons prospecting for gold. The poems endure as physical and spiritual signposts on the poet’s journey back to his roots.

We are invited in to Beville’s Limerick through MATINÉE AT THE SAVOY, with its cult films of the time, BUTTER DISH, a reminder of a deeply felt loss, the moving homage to his brother Michael in STILL-LIFE, the masterful use of nature in the homage to his father in The MASTER GARDENER and SWIMMING PALS; innocence giving way to maturity in ON THE WAY TO CHURCH, which is worth quoting in full:

Mother knelt to tie my shoelace,

auburn hair glowing in the sun.

Fingers swiftly knitting a knot.

With upturned, smiling face she leaned to kiss me

but I withdrew,

too old to welcome it,

too young to tie my shoe.

But the journey home is not just about childhood places and family memories; it also requires a sort of cleansing, a facing up to love-loss and separation, both personal and spiritual, the children he fathered and the poet’s reasons for writing poems, his search for inner peace. I was particularly struck by the title poem FOOL’S GOLD which reveals, amongst other revelations, Beville’s relationship with the poem:

For poetry I am but a fool

who hacks until he finds a jewel.

FRAGILE, with its precise, emotive description of moving house, is much more than a list. It conveys a heart-felt account of separation:

A cigar of carpet.

An honest mirror.

A clutter of pots and pans.

A suitcase of sacred stuff.

A clatter of cutlery.

An empty vase.

….

A last look at what is lost.

Nothing left to retrieve.

Impossible to calculate the cost.

CEDAR OF LEBANON shows the fusion of two cultures and the musician in Beville’s oeuvre with the musicality of the lines:

I thought I heard the cedar sing,

a sirocco song in the humid night

strummed by wind and hummed by sultans

a harmony that made the willow weep.

And the artist/painter in MAKING RAINBOWS with its colourful brush strokes in the pining for smells and memories of home.

A distant moment of delight

refracting hues of happiness

in shards of broken light.