Kelly, Brigit Pegeen 1951-

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KELLY, Brigit Pegeen 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born 1951, in Palo Alto, CA.

ADDRESSES:

Home—506 West Main St., Urbana, IL 61801-2504. Office—University of Illinois, Department of English, 608 South Wright, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, 1987, for To the Place of Trumpets; Lamont Poetry Prize, Academy of American Poets, 1994, for Song; Whiting Writers Award, 1996; Theodore Roethke Prize, Poetry Northwest; Discovery Award, Nation magazine; Cecil Hemley Award, Poetry Society of America; Pushcart Prize; fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois State Council on the Arts, and New Jersey Council on the Arts. Work chosen for 1993 and 1994 volumes of The Best American Poetry.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

To the Place of Trumpets, foreword by James Merrill, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1988.

Song, BOA Editions (Brockport, NY), 1995.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A volume of poetry.

SIDELIGHTS:

Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poetry is rich in detail and complex in emotion. Her subjects include the glories of nature, the capacity for evil, and the doubts stirred in her by religion. Her work has won numerous prizes; acclaimed poet James Merrill selected her first collection, To the Place of Trumpets, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and her subsequent volume, Song, was the 1994 selection for the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets, given for the best second book.

To the Place of Trumpets includes several poems that reflect Kelly's Catholic upbringing. In "Imagining Their Own Hymns," she writes of angels in stained-glass windows coming to life and flying away because they are "sick of Jesus, who never stops dying." In "Those Who Wrestle with the Angel for Us," she also uses religious imagery to portray her brother's daring as a pilot. Some poems ponder death and dying, while Kelly also observes the natural world—fields, trees, animals—and wonders how changing one aspect of a life might affect all the others.

"This is a promising first book, filled with a language that is both private and transcendent," commented Judith Kitchen in Georgia Review. Some poems, Kitchen noted, show Kelly to be adept at taking on a child's point of view. "The Catholic Sundays of childhood are subjected to the scrutiny of a child's honest gaze," Kitchen related. "Retrieving that child in its innocence is a difficult task, and one that Kelly has mastered beautifully." Kitchen thought Kelly too vague at times, however, painting expansive word-portraits yet leaving much unexplained. "I keep wanting more of the hidden narrative," Kitchen remarked. Some other critics, though, characterized Kelly's tendency toward ambiguity as a positive aspect of her style. The poems in To the Place of Trumpets "exude an ambiguous wisdom," in the opinion of Library Journal contributor Fred Muratori. A Kliatt reviewer, meanwhile, called Kelly "a poet-magician" whose work "offers great challenges and great rewards."

In Song, Kelly frequently uses music as a motif while dealing with many of the same subjects as in her first collection. The title poem associates a haunting tune with the brutal killing of a girl's pet goat by a group of boys. This poem "appropriately introduces the reader to some of the unexpected and compelling ways the poet achieves meaning and effect through the agency of music," observed Robert Buttel in American Book Review. In another poem she refers to the sounds made by bats as "the peculiar lost fluting of an outcast heart" and a group of trees as "a touchy choir," and throughout the volume she juxtaposes natural beauty against human cruelty. She also, as in her first book, refers often to religion, treating it with a mix of fascination and skepticism.

"The religious imagination is part and parcel of Kelly's work," related Stephen Yenser in the Yale Review. "Always in touch with the so-called natural world, her poems nonetheless present it ineluctably in Christian terms, whose implicit verities she invariably calls into question." Buttel noted that in Kelly's poems, "spiritual certainty or any connection with divinity remains elusive," but still, in dealing with nature and everyday occurrences, "she experiences uncanny, fortuitous moments that have all the revelatory impact of epiphanies." Kelly has a "singular, passionate, and accomplished art," Buttel added. Booklist contributor Patricia Monaghan called Song "a glorious, wild work" with a "symphonic" quality, while Yenser summed it up by saying it "is the reason one writes reviews. It could even be the reason one writes poems."