Selected Poems Patrick Kavanagh

by Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon (Editor)

Overview

"All Kavanagh’s gifts are on display,” as Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction to this new selection of 40 poems spanning 30 years of Patrick Kavanagh’s career. In truth, these gifts were hard-won, from his earliest self-taught verses after leaving primary school at the age of 13, to his refusal of sanitized pastoral depictions of rural Ireland while living among Dublin’s literary elite, to his transcendent later poems written in the wake of an operation to remove one of his lungs after a cancer diagnosis. Throughout his life, Patrick Kavanagh would carve out a place for himself as one of Ireland’s most important poets with what Muldoon calls “the documentarian’s eye and ear for the everyday technical term.” Gathered here are among his best and best-known poems, beginning with some of his earliest publications in 1930 and continuing chronologically into the 1960s with essentials from his career, as well as highlights left unpublished during his lifetime. "The Great Hunger," often considered his major achievement, is presented as a centerpiece alongside "Lough Derg," a poem of nearly equal length and possibly equal, though unrecognized, importance. Paul Muldoon presents his selection with a characteristically deft introduction, weaving biographical details into new ways of looking at Kavanagh’s life and lasting legacy of finding “a star-lovely art / In a dark sod.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943667024
Publisher:	Wake Forest University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2022
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, in October 1904. His poetry collections include Ploughman and Other Poems (1936), A Soul for Sale (1947), and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960). He also wrote the novel Tarry Flynn (1948) and an early autobiography, The Green Fool (1938). He died in Dublin in November 1967. Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of over a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968–2014; and, recently, Frolic and Detour.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Paul Muldoon Ploughman To a Late Poplar Tinker's Wife Inniskeen Road: July Evening Sanctity The Hired Boy Shancoduff Poplar Memory Pursuit of an Ideal Memory of My Father To the Man After the Harrow Spraying the Potatoes Stony Grey Soil A Christmas Childhood Art McCooey The Long Garden The Great Hunger Lough Derg Advent Peace Pegasus Memory of Brother Michael Bluebells for Love Temptation in Harvest In Memory of My Mother On Raglan Road Kerr's Ass Who Killed James Joyce? Innocence Epic On Looking into E. V. Reiu's Homer I Had a Future If Ever You Go to Dublin Town On Reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers The Hospital October Come Dance with Kitty Stobling Canal Bank Walk Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin Literary Adventures

Editorial Reviews

"A beacon of clarity and conciseness by which so many of the rest of us will continue to steer.” —Paul Muldoon, from the introduction

"Indispensable... a book that should jolt readers back to an awareness of this poet's place in the twentieth-century pantheon." —Seamus Heaney on Patrick Kavanagh's Collected Poems (2005)

From the Publisher