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“... twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But: Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded. k: I see you do be writing for a paper called the New Yorker. me: I do. k: I dare say for a piece in a paper like that you might get big ...”

“... My acceptance of an offer to review the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist ...”

“... on all approaches to poetry not in keeping with the realities of the day. In that year, 1941, Patrick Kavanagh was writing a 757-line poem on the charmlessness of Irish country life, which nevertheless manages to encompass a good deal of its pungency: The potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move Along the side-fall of the hill ... Austin ...”

“... is too little with us – that all issues are reduced to the level of the parish pump. Yet, as Patrick Kavanagh warned, Irish writers turn outward at their peril. Disgusted by the loud quarrels of his Monaghan neighbours, he wrote:That was the year of the Munich bother. WhichWas more important? I inclinedTo lost my faith in Ballyrish and GortinTill ...”

“... a man with his best work far behind him, to be compared dismissively with Joyce, to be detected by Patrick Kavanagh as a journalist without a sustaining myth ‘that would carry all the stuff in his column, that would lift it onto a creative plane’, was to be cruelly caught in a half-truth. For it is the distinction of Brian O’Nolan that amongst those ...”

“... the evocation of verticality and upswing. In ‘The Loose Box’ Heaney writes:On an old recording Patrick Kavanagh statesThat there’s health and worth in any talkaboutThe properties of land. Sandy, glarry,Mossy, heavy, cold, the actual soilAlmost doesn’t matter; the main thing isAn inner restitution, a purchase come byBy pacing it in words that make ...”

“... Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to ...”

“... whereas Cavan and even Monaghan have a less decided orientation. I cannot, for example, think of Patrick Kavanagh as a Northern writer, any more than I would wish to allocate Peadar O’Donnell to the South.’ Donegal is part of the North, yes, but it’s also the place many Northerners go to escape from ‘Norn Ireland’, as we sometimes call ...”

“... fosterers of Irish spirituality. Butler, in a Bell article deploring the unruly literary views of Patrick Kavanagh, distinguished between the parochialism of 1901, which contained the potential for enlargement of outlook, and that of 1951, which didn’t. He likens the mind of the Mucker poet, when it’s not engaged with poetry or fiction, to ‘a ...”

“... some way to overturning this stereotype, but the editors of the journals don’t help themselves. Patrick Kavanagh wrote: ‘there is practically no literary public in this country and there has never been a literary tradition,’ a fact that must have slipped his mind when he founded Kavanagh’s Weekly with his ...”

“... of this survived independence, it gradually gave way to the plainer, more disenchanted idiom of Patrick Kavanagh, or the self-parodic minimalism of Samuel Beckett, so fearful of writing Hiberno-English that he ceased to write in English altogether. Colm Tóibín’s austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing ...”

“... In 1914 Patrick MacGill’s first novel, Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. In the same year, Joyce’s Dubliners sold 499 copies, 120 of them bought by the author. In 1915, MacGill published a companion novel, The Rat-Pit, which was also highly successful and contained a Preface in which the author avowed himself to be ‘highly gratified’ by the success attained by Children of the Dead End ‘in Britain and abroad ...”

“... of the Abbey and Radio Eireann. The other was the marginalised pub culture of Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, in which writers accepted their isolation and took refuge in drink, dark satire and glorious bouts of excoriation. O’Faolain was too much an intellectual rebel to embrace the former course, too much a personal ...”

“... must be another of nature’s old con tricks. Another writer McGahern brings to mind is the poet Patrick Kavanagh. McGahern’s story ‘Bank Holiday’, despite its curious but endearing earnestness (‘I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement,’ the chief character says, ‘mulling over that old, useless chestnut What is ...”

“... when this volume begins, Betjeman was feeling the anxiety of the ageing writer, well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along ...”