A poet's country

the long version

"A Poet's Country is both a reliable scholarly edition and an immensely readable, entertaining collection. It contains the essential shorter prose works from throughout Kavanagh's career: the legendary autobiographical pieces and rural reminiscences, as well as a thorough selection of Kavanagh's penetrating, sometimes scabrous, literary criticism. Its verve and musicality, poignancy and pitch, rage and glory, expresses as no other the voice of rural Ireland. Like a menhir, Kavanagh stands alone at the summit of Irish literature of the mid twentieth century."--Jacket.