Selected Poems

One of the major figures in the modern Irish poetic canon, Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) released Anglo-Irish verse from its prolonged obsession with history, ethnicity and national politics. Instead his poetry, written in an uninhibited vernacular style, focuses on closely observed images of rural life, where 'ordinary things wear lovely wings'. This selection ranges from Kavanagh's early poems such as 'Tinker's Wife' and 'Inniskeen Road: July Evening', to his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger' and his celebratory later verse 'To Hell with Common Sense' and 'Come Dance with Kitty Stobling'. The first comprehensive selection of Kavanagh's poetry to be published, this volumes offers a timely reassessment of a poet unfairly neglected outside Ireland.