Patrick Kavanagh - the Inexhaustible Adventure of a Gravelled Yard

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Sunday Feature: Patrick Kavanagh: the Inexhaustible Adventure of a Gravelled Yard

Patrick Kavanagh: the Inexhaustible Adventure of a Gravelled Yard

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Patrick Kavanagh: the Inexhaustible Adventure of a Gravelled Yard

Theo Dorgan finds out  why Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, who died in 1968, is so loved now.

Theo Dorgan wanders the streets of Dublin and lanes of County Monaghan, tracing the life and significance of one of Ireland's most revered poets, Patrick Kavanagh.

WB Yeats is revered, Seamus Heaney is beloved, but the poet that everyone in Ireland can quote is Patrick Kavanagh. In a programme first broadcast in 2018, half a century after Kavanagh's death, Theo Dorgan wanders the streets of Dublin and lanes of County Monaghan, tracing his life and significance. 

Patrick Kavanagh was one of ten children, his father a shoemaker and farmer. He wrote unflinchingly about the poverty of Ireland's rural population. It was Kavanagh's poems, such as 'Kerr's Ass' and 'The Great Hunger', with their insistence on the labour, the local, the idioms of speech, that Heaney said gave him his 'word hoard' and even permission to write. 

Dorgan meets Peter Murphy, aged 90, who knew Kavanagh before he walked the 60 miles to Dublin to meet AE (George Russell) who had published his early poems. Kavanagh plunged into the literary life of the city - while despising it - becoming a Dublin character. He once sued a newspaper for calling him an alcoholic sponger - and lost. 

Kavanagh developed cancer and had a lung removed. Convalescing, he sat by Dublin's Grand Canal and achieved some peace. This led to great poems, such as 'The Hospital', a moving expression of his appreciation of 'the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard'.

Theo meets Seamus Hosey, who for years taught Kavanagh's poems to school students. They are lodged in the memories of generations of Irish people. 

Theo visits Kavanagh's grave, birthplace and places in between. He talks to those who know about this one-man awkward squad, yet a man more beloved than he knew. Not least because he wrote the great song of unrequited love, 'Raglan Road', sung somewhere, in Ireland and around the world, every night.

Presenter: Theo Dorgan
Reader: Jim Norton
Producer: Julian May

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