A Poet's Country: Selected Prose

This is the first authoritative gathering of the shorter prose writings of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), one of Ireland's greatest modern poets. While he was best known as a poet, for most of his writing life he was a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his time, and past times; on the spiritual function of poetry; and on his own background and experiences as an isolated genius, impoverished, sometimes ostracized, and surrounded, as he saw it, by mediocrity. The prose complements the poetry telling us things about Kavanagh that the poems do not tell. Here are the legendary autobiographical pieces and rural reminiscences and a thorough selection of his penetrating, sometimes scabrous, literary and cultural criticism. Its verve and musicality, poignancy and pitch, rage and glory, expresses as no other the voice of rural Ireland..The present selection with its lyrical sketches, intuitive aperçus and immortal asides...scrambles the elements of the myth and forces us to look at it fresh.""-The Irish Times