Collected Poems

Kavanagh P. J.

P. J. Kavanagh's poems are filled with praise, with the minute observations that transform a mood, or the dazzling recollection that can change the heart. "If description is revelation", wrote Derek Mahon in the Irish Times, "his revelatory gift is prodigious. Now is the time to read P. J. Kavanagh".

The religious sympathies of Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, the earth-love of Edward Thomas, the urbane wit of Louis MacNeice, are three of the many currents that run through his verse, giving it "that quality of sheer readability" Vernon Scannell noted in the Sunday Telegraph. John Bayley declared, "there are poets in any age who can give the impression of
talk. Kavanagh is a real craftsman at this difficult form".

The contents of seven collections are included in this comprehensive volume, which traces the poet through three and a half decades and ends with his remarkable human elegy and celebration of a beloved landscape, "Severn Aisling", described by Frank Kermode as "quite magnificent".

About the Author

P. J. Kavanagh was born in England in 1931, and has worked as a lecturer, actor and broadcaster, as well as a writer. His Collected Poems were published in 1992, the year in which he was given the Cholmondeley Award for poetry. His memoir "The Perfect Stranger" won the Richard Hillary Prize in 1966, and his first novel "A Song and Dance" was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1968. From 1983 to 1996 P. J. Kavanagh was a columnist on the "Spectator", and from 1996 to 2002 on "The Times Literary Supplement". In addition to his four novels for adults and two children's novels, he has written a travel autobiography ("Finding Connections"), a literary companion ("Voices in Ireland") and has edited "The Oxford Book of Short Poems" and "The Essential G. K. Chesterton", and, for Carcanet, a new edition of his "Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney".

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