Christian Dupont espies John Behan’s unused drawings for Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Glenmacnass’.
Illustrating poetry is difficult, but not impossible – even if the verses are by Thomas Kinsella, once called ‘Ireland’s finest unread poet’ – his difficulty something of a trope.1 Louis le Brocquy masterfully populated Kinsella’s translation of the Táin with 133 calligraphic brush drawings for Liam Miller’s landmark Dolmen Press edition (1969). Anne Yeats deftly penned seven line drawingsfor Kinsella’s One, the fifth in the series of his own Peppercanister Press chapbooks (1974). In 2001, Poetry Ireland founder John F Deane commissioned John Behan to produce three drawings to illustrate a special limited edition of one of Kinsella’s later poems, ‘Glenmacnass’
Isabella Evangelisti visits the MAC in Belfast, where the work of selected painting graduates from Belfast School of Art is on show
