The death of poet Rory Brennan on November 17th, 2024, creates an unfillable gap in the lives of his family and friends. He leaves behind his beloved wife, the novelist and travel writer Fionnuala Brennan, his daughters Orla and Fiona, his sons-in-law Ciaran and Keith, and his grandson Luca.
I first met Rory Brennan more than 40 years ago at a convening of the board of Poetry Ireland in Buswells Hotel, Dublin. I recall a large pink urn, not at all Grecian or Keatsian, holding the middle of a plain low table and being “talked around” by a group of poets which included Rory himself, Conleth Ellis, John Ennis, Gabriel Rosenstock, and John F Deane, who had founded Poetry Ireland in 1978. Rory, the director, raised his hand and in a loud, mellifluous voice welcomed me as the newest member of the board.
There would be many more meetings over the following years, at which I grew to appreciate Rory’s irrepressible energy and commitment, his passionate desire to improve through practical measures the largely unchampioned and often-threadbare lot of Irish poets.
Fund-raising for the organisation, formulation of policy, the editorship and timely publication of Poetry Ireland Review, indeed the very survival and placing of Poetry Ireland on a secure footing, were an ongoing challenge which Rory met without fear or favour. Among many other achievements the Austin Clarke Library of some 5,000 books owned by Clarke was secured; and the until then peripatetic Poetry Ireland found a more settled residence.
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Not least, Rory played a crucial role in ensuring, along with John F Deane and the board, that appropriate venues and financial remuneration for poetry readings – other than the pub and the few pints of stout – were provided.
If, according to the poem by WB Yeats, there is an existential choice to be made between the life of personal contentment and the sacrifice involved in artistic endeavour, Rory seemed always to strike a happy balance between these two opposing viewpoints.
People warmed to his expansive yet courteous manner, his mischievous grin, his sudden laughter at the good of everything.
He had many friends and he always went the extra mile to keep in touch with them. He loved life and his life was richly lived. He was engaging and even-handed, an exuberant storyteller, a good listener, knowledgeable about many subjects but wearing that knowledge lightly.
An only child, Rory “confessed” to me once that he had an extremely happy childhood. He was born in Westport in 1945, but raised in Dublin, where he attended Trinity College.
He worked as a teacher in Dún Laoghaire Technical School, an educational broadcaster in RTÉ, an arts administrator and a lecturer in communications at Dublin City University.
He wrote many articles and reviews on history, fiction, poetry and literary criticism for such outlets as Books Ireland and also edited a special edition of Poetry Ireland Review devoted to a reassessment of the poet Austin Clarke.
Rory travelled widely throughout his life, and his poems reflect his questing, cosmopolitan spirit, his curiosity towards and lived experience of different cultures.
He taught for several years in places as diverse as Morocco and Sweden.
He settled for a number of years on the Aegean island of Paros and from 1979 he and his family spent all their summers there.
All the while Rory wrote poems of luminosity and lyric grace, ranging from the free-verse offerings of his earlier collections to exquisite later works of real technical accomplishment. Where personal feelings and experiences blend with formally gifted deliberations on the world at large, his poems achieve a resonance and power which is rare in contemporary poetry. Rory’s credo was and remains: “A poem must lift, take wing and fly – ideally, but not always – towards the sun.”
Nine collections of his work were published: The Sea on Fire (Dolmen,1978); The Walking Wounded (Dedalus,1985); The Wind Messages, a chapbook published in 1986 with illustrations by Alice Meyer-Wallace; The Old in Rapallo (Salmon Poetry, 1996); Sky Lights/Luces Del Cielo (Aegean Centre, 2012); Dancing with Luck (The American University Paris, 2016 with paintings by Rafael Mahdavi); Alone in Amphitheatres, with paintings by Rafael Mahdavi (The American University of Paris, 2017); Days and Islands, with photographs by Panagiotis Kalkavouris (Rodakio, Athens, 2020); and Irish Poets: Translations of Kavanagh, Heaney, Longley and Brennan by Takis Papageloupolos, Ekdoseis Armos, 2024). Two new collections are due to be published this year.
Rory Brennan’s poems received recognition by way of the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1978, the Listowel Writers Week and William Allingham Prizes, and the WB Yeats Award of the New York Yeats Society, based at the National Arts Club, New York, in 2017.
Farewell, Rory. Our memory and consolation is in knowing that, as you yourself would say, the oracle was often good.