KELL, Richard (Alexander)

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Nationality: British. Born: Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, 1 November 1927. Education: Methodist College, Belfast; Wesley College, Dublin, 1944–46; Trinity College, Dublin, B.A. (honors) in English and French literature 1952. Family: Married Muriel Adelaide Nairn in 1953 (died 1975); two sons (one deceased) and two daughters. Assistant teacher, Kilkenny College, Ireland, and Whinney Bank School, Middlesborough, Cleveland; assistant librarian, Luton Public Library, Bedfordshire, 1954–56, and Brunel College of Technology, Acton, Middlesex, 1956–59; assistant lecturer, 1960–65, and lecturer in English, 1966–70, Isleworth Polytechnic, London; senior lecturer in English, Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, 1970–83. Address: 18 Rectory Grove, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne NE3 1AL, England.

Publications

Poetry

(Poems). Oxford, Fantasy Press, 1957.

Control Tower. London, Chatto and Windus-Hogarth Press, 1962

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Six Irish Poets, with others, edited by Robin Skelton. London, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Differences. London, Chatto and Windus-Hogarth Press, 1969.

Humours. Sunderland, Ceolfrith, 1978.

Heartwood. Newcastle upon Tyne, Northern House, 1978.

The Broken Circle. Sunderland, Ceolfrith, 1981.

Wall, with others, edited by Noel Connor. Brampton, Cumbria, LYC Press, 1981.

In Praise of Warmth. Dublin, Dedalus, 1987.

Five Irish Poets, with others, edited by David Lampe and Dennis Maloney. Fredonia, New York, White Pine Press, and Dublin, Dedalus, 1990.

Rock and Water. Dublin, Dedalus, 1993.

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Manuscript Collection: Literary and Philosophical Society Library, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Critical Study: "Being Finite" by Chris Agee, in Books Ireland (Kilkenny), February 1988.

Richard Kell comments:

(1970) The poems in Control Tower, largely reflective and descriptive, were written without any awareness of a predominant theme. In retrospect, however, it appears that one of my main concerns was the opposition between negative and positive states (restraint and freedom, deprivation and fulfillment, apathy and love, skepticism and faith, inner blindness and vision), often with a note of regret for the elusiveness of the second. Though some aspect of the theme itself was implied fairly frequently, the experiences that represented it were varied, ranging from the sight of some empty coal carts to a meditation focused on the image of a Buddhist goddess. In Differences the same kind of dichotomy emerges, but with an emphasis on harmony and conflict as concomitants of diversity. As for technique, I like to combine fairly well-defined verse forms—of many types and not necessarily traditional—with rhythmic flexibility. In the choice and syntactic ordering of words, I aim at intelligibility as well as imaginative precision, which does not preclude double meanings when these are useful. In general my poetry tends to be quiet and controlled rather than effusive; I love freedom but am distrustful of excess.

(1980) The poems in Humours, written in 1964 and 1965 and printed with accompanying pictures by Dick Ward, are concerned with familiar human dispositions, states of mind, beliefs, practices. These are often presented symbolically, and the style is dry and witty, broadly speaking, rather than lyrical. By contrast, the poems in Heartwood express personal feeling in a fairly direct way. They were written in memory of my wife, who died in a swimming accident in 1975.

(1985) The Broken Circle contains several poems of disenchantment in which the "negative and positive states" referred to above are associated with religious themes. "The Dancers" explores the possibility that aesthetic experience and artistic creation may be more meaningful witnesses to the Logos than formal religion. This poem is in five parts, not four, as a printer's error suggests; the last part begins "May they rest in peace."

(1990) In Praise of Warmth adds twenty-four new poems, on both personal and public themes, to a selection from previous books.

(1995) Rock and Water contains seventy new poems arranged in six thematic sections.

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At the heart of Richard Kell's poetry is a metaphysical paradox of heart and head, clearly stated in the early poem "The Balance":

   Always the one that will not let me be—
   when I would overflow (the mind free,
   the heart ready to love, the voice to sing),
   reminds me with its prudent nagging tongue
 
 
   that life is such and such: the free mind,
   the loving heart and singing voice are kind;
   so plan, cherish, be provident, pay the bills:
   the horses lumber, but the tiger kills.
 
 
   Always the one that will not let me change—
   when I'd be careful, sympathize, arrange
   (the voice level, the mind about to freeze),
   recalls what goodness tamed no longer sees,
 
 
   that life is such and such: the frozen mind
   and level voice are to themselves unkind;
   then play, be prodigal, give joy its head:
   the fountain's reckless, but the cistern's dead.

Between Blakean metaphors of fountain and cistern, tigers and horses, Kell chisels a poetry of controlled moral passion. His theme recurs, with seventeen Stevens-like variations, in the title poem of In Praise of Warmth: "Right and left will not make middle, / but hot and cold make warm." For Kell the notion of balance conspires with the nature of experience, and indeed the nature of emotional man and the uncompromising nature of "things" are everywhere contrasted in his work: "Identity of opposites? Out of this world! / Being finite, I'm content with the tug-of-war."

Kell's apparent acceptance of struggle bespeaks his torment, too, of not being able to survive at the pitch of extremes. In poems of passion or sorrow he checks himself with language persistently, sometimes humorously, calling upon his intelligence for succor. If "violence breeds in every natural thing," then human beings must have recourse to discipline. In a poem aptly called "Decorum" he invokes the brave, austere "far-off voice" on the telephone bearing (in two senses) its bad news.

What is most moving about Kell's poetry is its unstated motif of human fortitude. The stoic poems of Heartwood, a sequence dedicated to his drowned wife, make a disciplined bid for understanding through sustained metaphor. In "Marriage Is like a Tree" he celebrates the sound heartwood of a marriage, "twenty-two rings of tough growth" that no flood could destroy: "It could be a kind of luck, being left / the ghost of a scarred tree / still healthy when it toppled: / leaves whispering through all the mind's seasons, / a root safe in the ground for ever."

Always a technician, a man in love with the musical scope of his art, Kell has been drawn to prosodic experiment, and a long meditation on traveling, both physical and metaphysical, has extended his considerable range. He also has had much to say in free verse about man's foolish, fearful destruction of the planet. Kell is most at home, however, in verse forms in which a play of intelligence gives shape to the complex feelings of a soul "charged with the gloomed / benignity of green pastures," facing with regretful patience "the furies of the motorway."

—Anne Stevenson