Victoria Kennefick: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor

This week's New Poetries blog comes from contributor Victoria Kennefick. Here you can read her introductory commentary from the anthology, and read her poem 'Intercession to St. Anthony', which you can also watch Victoria reading below.  

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My father died in 2010, my life forever divided into before and after. Dealing with his loss wrecked parts of myself I had constructed haphazardly, like the mask I had pressed to my face that I thought made me invincible, untouchable and mysterious. God help me, it slipped from my grasp, shattering at my feet like porcelain when he died, its pieces scattered all over. I felt raw and red. Less loved. 

I have always written poetry but was afraid to commit to it, hiding behind writing about others’ work. Death clarifies things, and now that my mask had smashed, I couldn’t stop writing about my father. I grasped at snatches of memory, the intonations of his voice, his funny turns-of-phrase, so I could keep him here with me encased in the resin of my words. The poems from this period form part of my pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015). 

Following its publication, I was struck by how ill-equipped and fragile I was when confronted with an event I could not control. I picked up the broken pieces of my mask and examined each one in turn. I cut myself many times but came to see how each sharp fragment formed part of a complex coping mechanism I had fashioned, a process which had begun when I was a child.  

Back then, I had not made the connection between words and their multiple meanings – lamb in the field, lamb for dinner; chicken with chicks, chicken and chips. I wondered, and wonder still, what else I might have missed. Poetry then is an act of urgency for me; it provides an angle from which I can survey lacunae in my understanding, while its figurative elements supply material to generate a replica of my interiority. It is an act of conversion; I melt down my tempers into something molten to pour into the cracks.  

Turning up the heat reveals that my concerns are, and not just as a writer, embedded in acts of consumption, replacement and resistance. For example, deciding to become a vegetarian at six, in hindsight, was an attempt at control but also a rebellion. I couldn’t live with myself if my life depended on suffering and death; nor did I, even then, want to be judged as a woman. Such restriction is, as I found in my writing, a response to the paralysing fear of growing up, of sexuality, of death, and of shame, particularly as I come from an Irish Catholic background.

After White Whale, which felt both revelatory and a prelude, I started writing from the root of these anxieties. Reconstructing the shards of the broken mask conversely exposed the veracity of experience beneath. I fused these jagged pieces back together with words in my approximation of the Japanese art of Kintsugi or ‘golden joinery.’ Language allows for this. Poetry allows for this, and the poems took shape, text written to repair the fissures, to make something new, bolstered by the art and profound feminist anger of my poetry godmothers: Plath, Sexton, Olds, Clifton, Boland, Berry and Seuss among them. 

Poetry created out of necessity resonates with me, written in the only way it could be written. The incendiary images of Sylvia Plath and the audacious truths of Anne Sexton, the assembled worlds of Emily Berry’s books: their poems put things together to create shapes which engage and can be trusted. My poems are written in the only way I could write them – to be true. Among other things, they are a belated farewell to a difficult, extended girlhood and an embrace of a more complex – but I hope, healthier – womanhood. This journey didn’t start until my world broke apart and that mask fragmented, but the funny thing is that my mask never really worked anyway. Everyone saw me, except myself. 

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Intercession to St. Anthony 

I am on my knees. 

Find him –

Was that his baldhead bobbing,

a candle-flame on my horizon – 

the scar a tell, upside-down horse shoe

with all the luck spilled out.

The earth is eating 

my family up – 

it practises sucking at the soles 

of my shoes. I can’t resist pressing 

my fingers into its soil, smearing muck 

on my face, war paint. But I’m a loser,

my father died when I wasn’t looking.

Careless, I’ve mislaid

my keys again. I buzz around

a stupid bluebottle bouncing off

walls, where are they? 

Where is he? I hit my head on a shelf.

I swear I have left my body – 

Then you let me see, St. Anthony,

I’m broke from you and now

a gift given back –

a missing leopard print sock, 

the lost gold earring,

My keys and now – 

his clear white bones 

licked clean, burning the ground.

I get up; the scar dissolved, the candle quenched,

There, there he is – 

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New Poetries VIII is published in January 2021. Follow the Facebook page to keep up to date, and watch the contributors read their poems on YouTube.