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

WB Yeats is revered, Seamus Heaney is beloved, but the poet that everyone in Ireland can quote is Patrick Kavanagh. 50 years after Kavanagh's death, the poet Theo Dorgan wanders the streets of Dublin and lanes of Co Monaghan, tracing his life and significance. Patrick Kavanagh was one of 10 children, his father a shoemaker and farmer. He wrote unflinchingly, when this was being romanticised, about the poverty - material, sensual and spiritual - 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. The Great Hunger is a monumental achievement, a rural equivalent of TS Eliot's The Waste Land. Kavanagh also wrote lyrically of the beauty of the landscape and the spiritual consolation of nature. Kavanagh scholar Sister Una Agnew argues he is a Christian mystic. Kavanagh developed cancer and had a lung removed. During his convalescence he sat by Dublin's Grand Canal and achieved some peace. This led to some great poems, such The Hospital, a moving expression of his appreciation of `the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard". Kavanagh achieved simplicity, but was not simplistic. Dorgan demonstrates how keen his poetic sensibility was, aware, early on, of Ginsberg and the Beats. Half a century after Kavanagh's death, Theo Dorgan visits his grave, his birthplace, and places in between. He talks to those who knew, and know about this one man awkward squad capable of great tenderness, a ranter in drink, and for all that a man more beloved than he ever knew