"I say! Do you hear me? We have survived to laugh another day."
Patrick Kavanagh
1904-1967
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the poetry
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foreword
The poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote about Ireland -- city and country -- with an unparalleled honesty. Kavanagh is alternately mournful and satirical, dark and full of laughter. His poetry covers everything from farm animals and wildflowers to tinkers and priests. In his native County Monaghan, he is revered with The Patrick Kavanagh Centre; his second home of Dublin boasts a statue of him seated on a bench by the Grand Canal, from which this page took its name. U2 singer and lyricist Bono mentions Kavanagh as one of his influences. My first encounter with Patrick Kavanagh was through the song "On Raglan Road," the lyrics of which he wrote for melody based on the traditional Irish air, "The Dawning of the Day." The moving words led me to seek out more information and I was rewarded with a collection of his poems in the UCLA library. Having been thus initiated to this exhilarating stuff, my search for further resources (read: on the Internet) on Kavanagh and his works did not exactly yield a mountain of material. So I decided to construct this page. The links on the left-hand side take you to different sections of the page. |