Bog Myrtle & Peat

Following a recommendation from a friend, I read Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn in 2019. I’d never heard of Kavanagh, but from Tarry Flynn, I assumed the man was a novelist. Then I learned that he was a poet, and afterwards I began to understand how his work fitted alongside other Irish writers. But I lacked a clear overview, and my progress was dogged by a sense of insecurity, as if I walked through a minefield of undiscovered information. Perhaps a poem I loved was in response to something I’d never read, or was written on a deathbed or after the birth of a child. Books and poems can exist in isolation, but I’m too interested in these things to let them lie alone, and Kavanagh seemed to be telling me something. My curiosity grew arms and legs.

They’ve made much of the man in County Monaghan. The old Catholic church at Inniskeen has been converted into The Patrick Kavanagh centre, and you can visit his grave if you want to. But looking for his stony Grey Soil of Monaghan, I was strangely disappointed. The place is lovely; it’s rich and comfortable, and a deep green river runs through it. I was expecting to find a landscape so hard it would break a young poet’s heart, but really it’s just like any piece of ground you’ll find off the main road between Dublin and Belfast. I’ve been shy of standing too near my heroes, and my fingers were burnt at Bellaghy to realise that Heaney’s Home Place was nothing like I imagined it. But I don’t know so much about Kavanagh, and having collected many bright pieces of the puzzle, I hoped that a visit to Inniskeen would help me to understand how they fit together.

So I learnt that Kavanagh was Ireland’s national poet for a time. His words poured into the 1940s and 50s, describing a difficult transition from old ways into new. I love Heaney’s verse because he divined the sacred and wonderful beauty of the world in language that is homespun and agricultural. Ireland has an obsession with its own agricultural past, and even in the twenty-first century there’s a recurring deference to a land-based peasant culture which has begun to feel strangely clunky today. Kavanagh laid the groundwork for Heaney’s verse, and his poetry is even more connected to that agrarian past because while Heaney harked back to rural memories, Kavanagh lived them first-hand. His first collections of poetry were written when he was farming, and he made the difficult leap into literary circles from an authentically agricultural community. His poems “The Great Hunger” and “Stony Grey Soil” are landmark reflections on the tragedy and love of life on the land, but Kavanagh remained acutely ambivalent about his rural background, unsure whether his life at Inniskeen had forged or stifled him.

And there’s a balance to strike in depictions of Irish rurality. Some of Kavanagh’s earliest writing fed a popular demand for nostalgic descriptions of friendly farmers and mischievous livestock – it’s soft and gentle stuff, and it’s hard to square that material with his later attempts to challenge traditional representations of rural Ireland. I’m hardly one to mock, remembering my own first saccharine steps into “nature writing”, but the conflict in Kavanagh’s own back-catalogue feels almost scyzophrenic at times. The serpent eats his own tail, and it’s hard to derive a clear narrative from Kavanagh’s lifetime of work.

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect clear narratives anyway – all writers revolve through time. But Kavanagh’s inconsistencies feel noisy because he is so often measured against poets like Heaney and Yeats. They were inconsistent too, and they often became fixated on riddles and tangents. The difference is that Heaney and Yeats’ work coincided with moments of national upheaval, and their poetry was deployed to make statements of clarity and consolation. They broke out from the humdrum introspection of literary circles to become political icons – and that elevation simplified them in the public consciousness. Yeats is one of the most complex literary figures of the Twentieth Century, but in Sligo he’s simply the author of April 1916. Likewise, Heaney was often looked to as a standing stone of stability in Ulster during the Troubles, but it’s important to remember that some of his first (and most exciting) poetry was published under the pseudonym incertus (meaning “unsure”). Fame is strangely fickle, and while each poets shines to the best of their ability, legacies are determined by external forces.

Timing feels important for Kavanagh too. The best of his writing emerged at a time when the nation was distracted by list of complex dilemmas. Ireland was neutral during the Second World War “Emergency”, but latent loyalties were divided – it would have been impossible to capture the spirit and voice of a nation in one man, and crisis never called Kavanagh’s name. Besides, the man was deliberately provocative and controversial amongst his own set. He isolated himself in order to pursue a sense of creative clarity, and he railed against the literary establishment of the day. While his influence on Irish poetry is undeniably vast, his legacy is treated with a sense of ambivalence. He did great things, but it’s hard to reconcile them against a catalogue of disappointment and failure. Since his death in 1967, no single sense of unity has coalesced around Patrick Kavanagh, and it’s not immediately obvious how an outsider like me should understand him. But going to Inniskeen provided a start point which takes me beyond a few disjointed scraps of his poetry. I have a map now, and I can start to unpick him properly.