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“... study and relentless practice, making, building – the emphasis is constant. Moreover, from P.J. Kavanagh’s warm and judicious Introduction, but also from the poems themselves, we get the clear impression that Gurney in the years after demobilisation went without sleep, went without food, quite simply overworked himself into his mental breakdown – which ...”

“... only in death: an unexpectedly romantic conclusion with which Kleist would have sympathised. P.J. Kavanagh’s Only by Mistake aligns itself with a different aspect of Romanticism, if Coleridge’s Kantian preoccupation with duty can be called romantic. No doubt the true romantic relies upon feeling and instinct, and like the Kleistian puppet allows no ...”

“... those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982): ‘Like most poets, he is dependent on the particular, and on being able to name it.’ Gurney was nonetheless committed and formally certified in 1922 ...”