Top 6 - Patrick Kavanagh selected by Martin Mooney

The poems of Patrick Kavanagh demonstrated to Seamus Heaney that the matter and voice of his rural home life could be the stuff of art and books. For many of us growing up later in the 1970s, the urban/rural borders in Irish life had become vaguer and more permeable, as towns expanded into the country and new estates sprang up in pastureland. So it wasn’t Kavanagh as a poet of the fields – the ploughman poet, as he was caricatured, not least by himself – who spoke to me when I first encountered the work. It was Kavanagh the poet of frustration and longing and determination to take notice of the ordinary.

‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ is a young man’s poem, and makes the best of the bad job of loneliness, and feeling at a tangent to one’s family and community. It’s ‘alienation’, the way a moody bookish teenager might use the word:

Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

Better poets than I have admired that ‘blooming’. I’ve always liked the opening line for its blunt annotation: ‘The bicycles go by in twos and threes’. Perfect.

‘The Great Hunger’ is anything but: rancourous, melodramatic, a kind of ‘Waste Land’ written by someone who I don’t think understood or sympathised with modernism. And yet… I sometimes think it’s the first Irish poem since the 17th century to deal head-on with real social and cultural problems without resorting to allegory. And it’s a characteristic Kavanagh move: don’t just describe a thing or comment on it – give it its proper name:

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.

Kavanagh disowned the long poem. ‘Shortly after it was published a couple of hefty lads came to my lonely shieling on Pembroke Road. One of them had a copy of the poem behind his back. He brought it to the front and he asked me, 'Did you write that?’ He was a policeman. It may seem shocking to the devotee of liberalism if I say that the police were right. For a poet in his true detachment is impervious to policemen. There is something wrong with a work of art, some kinetic vulgarity in it when it is visible to policemen.’ But ‘kinetic vulgarity’ is essential to poetry if it is engage with the world.

It has taken me a long time to learn how to value some of the plainer poems. Perhaps only in middle age does one appreciate understatement and sincere failure, or perhaps naively it takes certain experiences to open you to certain poems. There’s a streak of sentimentalism running through Kavanagh which makes me suspicious of poems like ‘Memory of my Father’; yet the more I try to dismiss it, the more it has stubbornly insisted on its honesty and urgency:

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.

And on the other hand Kavanagh grew fonder of rhetorical flourish and complexity as he aged, prone to half-baked satire and daft rhymes, a pub wit who’s had one or two too many and has started to repeat himself, again. But this late style also produced some of his sharpest insights into his own nature and the nature of what poetry had come to mean for him:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal.

That’s from ‘Canal Bank Walk’, one of a series of sonnets from the 1950s when Kavanagh was poor, aging, ill, and had to a large extent alienated whatever audience he’d had in Ireland. The ‘redemption’ the sonnets celebrate is both spiritual, a matter of a reconnection with or rediscovery by the muse, and physical, his surviving lung cancer with a lung amputated. By all means read ‘The Hospital’ on its own terms:

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins …
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge.

But read any of the canal bank sonnets aloud and concentrate less on what they say, more on their syntax, punctuation, line-length, how much breath one needs to say them, and you understand the meaning of poems such as ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’:

Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July.

The man recovering from cancer demands of himself and his readers the very thing that keeps us going, the thing that will inevitably stop, the thing that makes poetry possible.

Martin Mooney's most recent book of poems was 'Blue Lamp Disco' (Lagan Press, 2003). His next, 'The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen', is due next year.