‘Every old man I see / In October-coloured weather / Seems to say to me: ‘I was once your father’.” Wake Forest University Press – as part of their notable catalogue of Irish poetry – has recently published the Selected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh. The volume was selected, edited and introduced by the poet Paul Muldoon, who ends his prefatory note with the hope that Kavanagh’s work represents “a beacon of clarity and conciseness by which so many of the rest of us will continue to steer”.
Muldoon’s introduction is ele-giac. Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967, and the poet Eavan Bol-and affirmed “his name has rar-ely been absent from comment and controversy since then”. He had his share of literary enem-ies, she noted. He “could be sca-thing and colourful in speech”, and targeted the Irish Revival in particular: “How little of all that writing was of the slightest merit!” His monthly prose column for Envoy – however short-lived – was scathing: “To be successful one should avoid originality at all costs. How often have I observed cunning young men on the climb repeating carefully verbatim the old clichés which had served others before.”
Born in 1904 in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, he was baptised at St Mary’s Church – which he later dramatised: “The trip of iron tips on tile / Hesitated up the middle aisle, / Heads that were bowed glanced up to see / Who could this last arrival be.” Although Kavanagh could be an “intense Catholic”, according to his brother, the religion was not immune to his barbs. He identified as “a Catholic though not of the Lourdes-Fatima variety”. His faith was decidedly provincial, and yet replete with a mysticism: “The Holy Ghost descends / At random like the muse / On wise man and fool / And why should poet in the twilight choose?”
His first poetry collection was released in 1936. Ploughman and Other Poems was, as critic John Jordan noted, the work of “an autodidact”, who “practised the craft of cobbler and farmer” and showed “evidence of a small but pure talent”. That debut was followed by The Great Hunger (1942), A Soul for Sale (1947), and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960). The collection occasioned critical retrospectives, which, as Basil Payne observed in the Irish review Studies, revealed that Kavanagh’s “stature as a poet has tended to be denigrated by Irish readers and aspirant poets – possibly perhaps because his colourful personality and his controversial journalism have deflected attention from its fulcrum, the poet, to the swingboats he stubbornly pushes under our noses”.
I prefer that a selected book show where the poems first appeared, but this book is a fine collection – and a good argument for focusing on Kav-anagh’s verse rather than his invect-ive prose. Poems like “Shancoduff” showcase his control over sound. “My hills hoard the bright shillings of March,” he writes, “While the sun searches in every pocket.” Farmers lament when the “sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff”, causing them to wonder who “owns them hungry hills”, a poet? The narrator answers: “I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?”
Kavanagh’s poems tend to end mid-breath, on a melancholy pivot that other poets might follow with more lines. He often returns to his farmer-poet pedigree, ending one poem with a funereal stanza: “And poet lost to potato-fields, / Remembering the lime and copper smell / Of the spraying barrels he is not lost / Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.”
His shorter work juxtaposes well with long narratives like “Lough Derg” and “The Great Hunger”, which one contemporary critic called “vaguely pantheistic”, but “perhaps Franciscan”. The poem calls to mind William Everson, the mid-century American poet who spent nearly 20 years as a Dominican lay brother in a California monastery. Everson was raised on a farm in the San Joaquin Valley; his youthful pantheism evolv-ed into a Latin mysticism. Kavanagh, in contrast, went from his family’s nightly rosaries to a sacramentality of landscape. “Religion’s walls,” he wrote, “expand to the push of nature.”
“Advent”, a favourite of Catholics, remains a surprisingly gorgeous poem. Controlled, calm, it is one of his best works: “here in this Advent-darkened room / Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea / Of penance will charm back the luxury / Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom / The knowledge we stole but could not use.” The narrator ponders the “newness that was in every stale thing” that meets a child’s eyes: “the spirit-shocking / Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill”. An old man’s “tedious talking”. The atmosphere of “bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables”.
Kavanagh’s nearly halting lines and punctuation in “Advent” suggest a conversation of sorts. There is a “lover” mentioned in a first and later line, but another possibility remains. Some poets write to discover them-selves; others write toward their past selves. Kavanagh seemed to do both. Perhaps none is more prone to nostalgia than the satirist; barbs get heavy at some point. The poem ends gracefully: “We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages / Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour – / And Christ comes with a January flower.”
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