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“... come in around the halfway mark. The Stinging Fly, founded in 1998 by Declan Meade and Aoife Kavanagh, moved quickly to parity and women writers were in a majority in 2016. The editor of the Dublin Review, Brendan Barrington, an advocate of ‘that under-recognised creature, the Irish non-fiction writer’ remains dissatisfied with the journal’s gender ...”

“... the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence.* There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether ...”

“... David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very new, as if in the course of an attempt to prove that he was not a poet but a ...”

“... kept her own style lucidly straight-forward and informative, though not without the odd blunder: Patrick Kavanagh may have been the ‘leading poet of the Irish Republic after Yeats’, but the honour loses some of its lustre when we remember that Ireland did not become a republic until 1949, ten years after Yeats’s death. Yeats, incidentally, gets ...”

“... daughter, Sally, died suddenly of polio, in Java, where she had been living with her husband, Patrick Kavanagh. Just as Lehmann had at first faced the loss of Day-Lewis with disbelief, so she refused to accept Sally’s death, taking refuge this time in spiritualism. She became convinced that she was regularly in contact with her daughter. Her friend ...”

“... It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big House’, published in the Bell’s first issue. The magazine accordingly stood for ...”

“... Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height. Heaney says that ‘over the years I came to identify my own life with the ...”

“... changed, changed utterly.’ Later, as the fields rolled by, I asked him if he had known Patrick Kavanagh: ‘I only spent one afternoon with him,’ he said, ‘and I felt lucky to get out alive. I remember I asked him if he liked Thomas Hardy’s poems and of course he took that to be a kind of insult, as if I was asking a country poet if he ...”

“... of Burns. In this respect and others, Burns is like a peasant poet of modern times, the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, who spent many hard and lonely years as a farmer, and of whom Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet with close ties to the world of the countryside, has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am ...”

“... there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who has for many years been a crime reporter for a nationwide ...”

“... in Dublin and I see him sometimes on the street. We always stop and talk. He loves the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and we talk about that. He remembers some of my family. And he misses it, he says, the diocese and the priests. He looks sad as he moves slowly back towards his lodgings. It would be easy to think as I watch him shuffle away from me that ...”

“... own terms, setting them within an Irish imaginative space made habitable largely by the example of Patrick Kavanagh, and finding a thick, costive, consonantal music for the task (‘the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat’). He was especially struck by a book called The New Poetic (1964) by the New Zealand poet C.K. Stead that portrayed an Eliot very ...”

“... priest of Irish poetry: ‘a sentimentalist gone sour’.Among McGahern’s circle was the painter Patrick Swift, who in 1960 was in London, co-editing a magazine called X. The following year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of ...”

“... early creativity to specific anxieties about locale. When she saw the bench in Dublin where Patrick Kavanagh used to sit, and read his sonnet about the spot, she was thrilled by ‘the idea of place as something language could claim even if ownership had been denied’. ‘Because I was starting to locate myself in language,’ she recalls, ‘I ...”

“... Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s writing edited by women. Small World includes two perceptive pieces on Elizabeth ...”