Click here for Index
                                                 Email: info@searcs-web.com

                                               Searc's Web Guide to 21st Century Ireland - Brian Keenan (born 1951)

Brian Keenan was born in Belfast. He was educated at Ulster University where he obtained an MA and where he taught briefly before taking up a lecturing position at the American University in Beirut. In April, 1986 Keenan was abducted in Beirut by the Hezbollah militia and held as a hostage in their war against the Israeli occupation of the Lebanon and the United States government's support for same.
During his imprisonment Keenan was chained, blindfolded, beaten and assaulted in secret locations in the Lebanon, South Beirut, Baalbeck and near the Israeli border. He was moved fifteen times during his captivity, often in car boots or the underside of vehicles and spent one year without anything to read.
Keenan was released on August 24th, 1990 and his account of his captivity, An Evil Cradling, was published in 1992 and a novel Turlough about the 17th century blind Irish harpist, Turlough O'Carolan, was published in 2001. Keenan published Between Extremes: A Journey beyond Imagination (2000) with fellow hostage John McCarthy and Four Quarters of Light: An Alaskan Journey (2005).
Keenan's poem Faces from Old Photos Rediscovered is published here for the first time.©
Brian keenan
Brian Keenan

Faces from Old Photos Rediscovered

Huddled together like stones
Brute and doughfaced
They trespass again, intinerants
Freezing into focus
Something forgot.

A land and its people
Ground down to a gristle of blunt features
Bland mannered, asking little or nothing.
Like mushrooms
Their moon faces reveal
No dark other side
Neutralizing the mind
To open prepositions.
Half lingering, half gone,
Like a slow pendulum
Something stated between flesh and bone.

Harking back
Deciphering meaning from memory
That place where the marrow lies.
Crippling and ordering into
Into significance;
With desperate love
Immeasurable and inept
My face reflects
In the dull gloss of these old photos
Polyphonic faces blend
And overlap
I've left;
A roomful of old echoes.


© Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008


21st Century Irish Writers
Can't find what you're looking for? Check out our Research Services
© Copyright Searc.ie 1997-2008