Fencing a rough place

Back from the dead ("They're coming to get you, Barbara"), the Irish culture and heritage site Aughty have kindly republished an article I did a while back on rural poetry in the north of Ireland. It's available to download on pdf here.

"Modern rural verse can be traced back to one defining work: The Great Hunger written in 1942 by the Monaghan poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967). This epic poem liberated Irish verse from the Yeatsian world of fairies and noble peasants, showing rural life as brutal, tragic, bitter, euphoric, indeed everything it actually is rather than the romanticised view of old. Kavanagh had the nerve to include a hero without any heroic qualities, Paddy Maguire, a character who should ‘neither be damned or glorified,’ who struggles through a futile existence on his farm, who is doomed to an empty, celibate life and who, ‘said whatever came into his head / And inconsequently sang / While his world withered away.’

In alternating tones of anger, joy and despair, Kavanagh explodes the myth, the lie that ‘the peasant has no worries / In his little lyrical fields / He ploughs and sows.’

Though it is a work of tragedy, it is filled with remarkable images (‘potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move’) and even in its despair it has a sharp edge of humour from, ‘O Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever’ to the description of Maguire’s dream, ‘to clean his arse / With perennial grass / On the bank of some summer stream.’

The authorities confirmed the poem’s revolutionary power when they saw fit to have Kavanagh’s house raided and have it seized. Nonetheless, it got out and Irish poetry would never be the same again."