Voices in Ireland by P J Kavanagh
Taking the reader by the hand, P.J. Kavanagh travels the whole of Ireland, north as well as south, relating writers to places in a country dense with association and almost obsessed by locality. We see, in effect, an, infinite number of Irelands, those that formed St Patrick or James Joyce, Yeats or Somerville and Ross, Flann O'Brien or Edna O'Brien, or the dancers at Lughnasa. We also hear the magnificent defiance of O'Rahilly, last of the feudal bards. We learn how Swift kept his congregation from straying, how Lord Longford (the brother of the present one) contrived to pay his visitors' travel costs, how the fiery Mary Wollstonecraft fared as a governess, and how Yeats - a Senator in old age - trained his bodyguard in his profession. We watch George Moore get AE to introduce him to the Gods, and Brendan Behan perform "Maud Gonne at the Microphone" with a towel over his head. Here also are the great men of letters Ireland never exported, men like Douglas Hyde, William Carleton, or James Clarence Mangan. And just as fresh are the perceptions of visitors. T.H. White, who came to go fishing and stayed six years, thought Meath and Louth "what you might get if you brought Norfolk to the boil". Thackeray heard the Ptolemys learnedly discussed by street boys in rags. Geoffrey Grigson described the "coif of holiness" over Skellig Michael.
P. J. Kavanagh was a poet, writer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. Born in 1931, son of the radio comedy writer Ted Kavanagh, he went to a Benedictine school, served in the Korean war during national service, and worked for the British Council in Barcelona and Indonesia. He acted on stage and TV - his last appearance in an episode of Father Ted. The Perfect Stranger, awarded the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1966, describes his early life. His columns for The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement (he called them substitute poems) are collected in People and Places (1988) and A Kind of Journal (2003). Poetry remained his major occupation. His New Selected Poems came out in 2014. Earlier collections include Presences (1987), An Enchantment (1991) and Something About (2004). His Collected Poems was given the Cholmondeley Award in 1992. His novel A Song and Dance won the 1968 Guardian Fiction Prize. His other novels are A Happy Man, People and Weather and Only by Mistake, and for younger readers Scarf Jack and Rebel for Good. A travel-autobiography Finding Connections traces his Irish forebears in New Zealand. He edited G. K. Chesterton and Ivor Gurney, and the anthologies Voices in Ireland, The Oxford Book of Short Poems (with James Michie) and A Book of Consolations. P. J. died in August 2015 in the Cotswold hills, where he had come to live with his wife and two sons over forty years before.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780719549748 |
| ISBN 10 | 0719549744 |
| Title | Voices in Ireland |
| Author | P J Kavanagh |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | John Murray Press |
| Year published | 1994-07-14 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |