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‘Endgames: Good Friday Agreement’ & ‘Missus Windsor’s Hitmen’
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‘Endgames: Good Friday Agreement Cantos’ (CXCVIII-CCXXVII) and ‘Missus Windsor’s Hitmen Cantos’ CXIX-CXXXIII) from ‘Yrland Regained’ by Kevin Kiely Yrland Regained: Central Cantos is ‘structured’ within American modernist poetry techniques in the direction of H. D., Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams to Louis Zukofsky, predominantly the long poem, including Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and Ferlinghetti’s Americus. Kiely’s ‘war poetry’ presents the Six Counties War (1966-1998) from the perspective of Westminster and Downing Street. The ‘justified’ politics, media propaganda, and loyalist militarism is re-enacted in Missus Windsor’s Hitmen Cantos. Violent poetic lines echo British covert collusion strategies of manipulation, including Stormont rigged electoral districts, apartheid society, imposed sectarianism and partisan policing. ‘The Good Friday Agreement’ (1998) ‘ends’ the landgrab Six Counties war with a ‘tripartite treaty’ at Westminster’s political whims which are exposed in Endgames: GFA Cantos. The Peace Process ‘concluding’ the war is ‘release process’ for loyalist military with disintegrating unionism antagonistic to retreating London. Republicanism moves into constitutional politics. The Border Poll is imminent for the ultimate endgame: United Ireland. —Kevin Kiely PhD (UCD) in the Patronage of Poetry at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room; W. J. Fulbright Scholar in Poetry Washington (DC). M. Phil., Trinity College (Dublin); Hon., Fellow in Writing, University of Iowa. www.kevinkiely.net kevinkielypoetwiki
“Violence, power, colonialism, in a series of tragic and darkly humorous visions. A must read from one of Ireland’s most thoughtful and challenging poets.”—Connor Kelly writer/composer of Tell Me That We’re Human and The Ancestor (2020)
‘The epic ‘Yrland Regained’ fired off in flashes of fact and fury, reminiscent of Pound’s Cantos, Kiely lays out the centuries long wars with the Butcher’s Apron of London.’—Carlo Parcelli, American poet author of Canaanite Gospels: A Meditation on Empire |
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