Benedict Kiely, a writer in whom are joined magnificent lyrical and comic gifts, is one of the most admired of literary figures in his native Ireland…. [The State of Ireland, a selection of his short fiction, which concludes with 'Proxopera,"] exhibits not only the remarkable continuity of his themes, attitudes, and abiding concerns, but also the ways in which, over several decades, these have deepened and enriched themselves. (p. 3)
Kiely's art begins with a profound sense of place, of both physical and human geography, and of the integuments by which people and landscape are bound together. It would be entirely wrong, however, to 'place' him as a regional writer, for the strong center of his craft, in his novels no less than his short stories, is the shaping voice of the narrator. This voice may seem at first to be that of the seanachie, the traditional Irish storyteller, but in fact it is a far more complex and sophisticated instrument. Kiely moves very close indeed to the people of whom he writes—farmers, tradesmen, mechanics, journalists, doctors, priests, publicans—but the voice can complicate itself suddenly, distancing the speaker and reminding us that Kiely is a man of wide literary culture, with a deep, unyielding tolerance for almost every range and variety of human experience. It is this shaping voice within the stories that, I suspect, has fallen strangely upon the ears of a generation schooled to expect from art only a stern, ironical impersonality. But fashions have changed once more, and allow us now to see in his work a sensibility and an intelligence engaged in an exchange both with his readers and with his created world. (pp. 3-4)
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