‘Every old man I see / In October-coloured weather / Seems to say to me: ‘I was once your father’.” Wake Forest University Press – as part of their notable catalogue of Irish poetry – has recently published the Selected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh. The volume was selected, edited and introduced by the poet Paul Muldoon, who ends his prefatory note with the hope that Kavanagh’s work represents “a beacon of clarity and conciseness by which so many of the rest of us will continue to steer”.
Muldoon’s introduction is ele-giac. Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967, and the poet Eavan Bol-and affirmed “his name has rar-ely been absent from comment and controversy since then”. He had his share of literary enem-ies, she noted. He “could be sca-thing and colourful in speech”, and targeted the Irish Revival in particular: “How little of all that writing was of the slightest merit!” His monthly prose column for Envoy – however short-lived – was scathing: “To be successful one should avoid originality at all costs. How often have I observed cunning young men on the climb repeating carefully verbatim the old clichés which had served others before.”
