The poet Michael O’Loughlin pays homage to the great Patrick Kavanaghin today’s Irish Independent and discusses the Dublin of Raglan Road and Baggot street. Kavanagh endeared himself to me not only with his poetry, which has been overshadowed by the works of Yeats and Heaney, but also with his humour- for example this anatomical description in his book “Tarry Flynn”
“Tarry had never observed the sexual differences between men and women until this moment. Mary Reilly was tall, and if as Tarry’s mother had said she had a large bottom, Tarry suddenly realized now that this part of her was different from the bottoms of the ordinary country girls. All the girls, with the exception of May Callan, were squat, and as the country phrase had it -‘duck-arsed’. They were made for work, for breeding, their centre of gravity was low. But here was someone who was made for joy, a breaker of hearts.”
Tarry Flynn, published in 1948 and also banned , was a less bleak return to the theme of the brutally frank, despairing and banned Poem, The Great Hunger, first published in 1942 in which Kavanagh destroyed the utopian fantasy of de Valera’s rural Ireland.
Raglan Road, his most famous poem (later immortalised by Luke Kelly), was inspired by Kavanagh’s love for a beautiful young woman called Hilda Moriarty.
