The Kick: A Life Among Writers

by Richard Murphy

In The Kick, Irish poet Richard Murphy constructs - from astonishingly detailed diaries kept over five decades - a memoir of his personal life and the violent legacies of Anglo-Irish history. In unsparing prose, he writes about painfully delicate personal issues, including his sexuality, as well as the Protestant gentry from which he comes. With serene, devastating honesty, he describes the literary milieus of London, Dublin, and New York and his friendships and encounters with some of the leading postwar writers, including W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, J.R. Ackerley, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, John McGahern, and Conor Cruise O’Brien.

These are the personal, literary, and political engagements of a lifetime, as recounted by a poet with the “gift of epic objectivity.”

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature

400 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2002

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Richard Murphy was one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets. He is particularly known for poems that draw on the landscape and history of the west of Ireland. His Collected Poems (Gallery Press) was published in 2000, his acclaimed autobiography The Kick (Granta Books) in 2003. His awards include the Cheltenham Award and the American-Irish Foundation Award.

‘Richard Murphy’s verse is classical in a way that demonstrates what the classical strengths really are. It combines a high music with simplicity, force and directness in dealing with the world of action. He has the gift of epic objectivity: behind his poems we feel not the assertion of his personality, but the actuality of events, the facts and sufferings of history’ (Ted Hughes).

Source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SeamusHe...

Reviews

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book that proved a worthy companion for a few days holiday. I miss it since finishing it on Sunday!