Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Distinguished Poet
"Imagine a tapestry in which every color, itself resplendent, is couched next to another, equally brilliant hue. Such is Kelly's work, so gorgeous in its language, so vivid in its sonorousness. She is both lavish and demanding. Her images unfold intuitively, hypnotically. Her rhythms and repetitions drive the poems beyond mere logic into passion. Kelly's poetry is symphonic, and each poem is best appreciated as a total composition rather than as a series of melodic lines.” —Booklist
"…Her poems are like no one else’s—hard and luminous, weird in the sense of making a thing strange that we at last might see it..." —American Poet
Brigit Pegeen Kelly's book The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004) was named a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. One poem from the collection, “The Satyr's Heart,” was selected for a 2005 Pushcart Prize. Kelly's other poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a Finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press), selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Additional awards and honors include a Discovery/The Nation award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Kelly's poems have been anthologized in five Pushcart Prize volumes and six Best American Poetry collections, and have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Nation, The Yale Review, New England Review, Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Southern Review. Kelly teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois, and has also taught at the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, and Warren Wilson College, as well as numerous writers' conferences in the United States and Ireland. In 2002 the University of Illinois awarded her both humanities and campus-wide awards for excellence in teaching.
About THE ORCHARD (2004)
This stunning collection was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse. Stephen Dobyns writes, "Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of the very best poets now writing in the United States. In fact, there is no one who is any better. Not only are her poems brilliantly made, but they also give great pleasure. Rarely are those two qualities seen together in one poet, but in Kelly's work, especially in her new book, The Orchard, it happens again and again. For a lover of poetry, the result is pure exhilaration."
