A Poet's Country: Selected Prose

by Patrick Kavanagh, Antoinette Quinn (Editor)

While Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was above all a poet, for most of his writing life he was a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his time, and past times; on the spiritual function of poetry, and on his own background and experiences as an isolated genius, impoverished, sometimes ostracized, and surrounded, as he saw it, by mediocrity. The prose complements the poetry telling us things about Kavanagh that the poems do not tell. This is the first authoritative gathering of the shorter prose writings. Edited and introduced by Antoinette Quinn, Kavanagh’s leading interpreter and biographer, ‘A Poet’s Country: Selected Prose’ supplants the earlier, inadequate 1967, ‘Collected Prose,’ which contained material already available elsewhere and focused on later writings at the expense of work from the vital decades of the thirties and forties. ‘A Poet’s Country‘ is both a reliable scholarly edition and an immensely readable, entertaining collection. It contains the essential shorter prose works from throughout Kavanagh’s career: the legendary autobiographical pieces and rural reminiscences and a thorough selection of Kavanagh’s penetrating, sometimes scabrous, literary and cultural criticism. Its verve and musicality, poignancy and pitch, rage and glory, expresses as no other the voice of rural Ireland.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. Regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.

When the Irish Times compiled a list of favourite Irish poems in 2000, ten of his poems were in the top fifty, and Kavanagh was rated the second favourite poet behind WB Yeats. The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is presented each year for an unpublished collection of poems. The annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend takes place on the last weekend in September in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Ireland. The Patrick Kavanagh Centre, an interpretative centre set up to commemorate the poet, is located in Inniskeen. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[Paul Spiegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love Patrick Kavanagh, I love the prose, the earth under his fingernails, dog racing at Cabra, the smoky bars in Dublin, the honesty of his verse. Why would you read Yeats when you can read Kavanagh?

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.