All Kavanagh's gifts are on display, as Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction to this new selection of 40 poems spanning 30 years of Patrick Kavanagh's career. In truth, these gifts were hard-won, from his earliest self-taught verses after leaving primary school at the age of 13, to his refusal of sanitized pastoral depictions of rural Ireland while living among Dublin's literary elite, to his transcendent later poems written in the wake of an operation to remove one of his lungs after a cancer diagnosis. Throughout his life, Patrick Kavanagh would carve out a place for himself as one of Ireland's most important poets with what Muldoon calls the documentarian's eye and ear for the everyday technical term. Gathered here are among his best and best-known poems, beginning with some of his earliest publications in 1930 and continuing chronologically into the 1960s with essentials from his career, as well as highlights left unpublished during his lifetime. The Great Hunger, often considered his major achievement, is presented as a centerpiece alongside Lough Derg, a poem of nearly equal length and possibly equal, though unrecognized, importance. Paul Muldoon presents his selection with a characteristically deft introduction, weaving biographical details into new ways of looking at Kavanagh's life and lasting legacy of finding a star-lovely art / In a dark sod.
