Brendan Kennelly (1936, Ballylongford), Kennelly’s poetry can be scabrous, down-to-earth and colloquial. He avoids intellectual pretension and literary posturing, and his attitude to poetic language could be summed up in the title of one of his epic poems, Poetry my Arse. Another long (400-page) epic poem, The Book of Judas, published in 1991, topped the Irish best-seller list. A prolific and fluent writer, he has more than twenty books of poetry to his credit, including My Dark Fathers (1964), Collection One: Getting Up Early (1966), Good Souls to Survive (1967), Dream of a Black Fox (1968), Love Cry (1972), The Voices (1973), Shelley in Dublin (1974), A Kind of Trust (1975), Islandman (1977), A Small Light (1979) and The House That Jack Didn’t Build (1982). Kennelly has edited several other anthologies, including Between Innocence and Peace: Favourite Poems of Ireland (1993), Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present, with Katie Donovan and A. Norman Jeffares (1994), and Dublines, with Katie Donovan (1995). He has also written two novels, The Crooked Cross (1963) and The Florentines (1967), and three plays in a Greek Trilogy, Antigone, Medea and The Trojan Women. Kennelly is an Irish language (Gaelic) speaker, and has translated Irish poems in A Drinking Cup (1970) and Mary (Dublin 1987). A selection of his collected translations was published as Love of Ireland: Poems from the Irish (1989).