Of Patrick Kavanagh, a poet and novelist from the same County Monaghan in historic South Ulster from which my own darlin' O'Boylans originally hailed, Seamus Heaney (another Ulsterman) had this to say: "[Kavanagh] was forever seesawing between anger and equipoise, the anger brought on by the sight of artists of less talent and, in his view, less integrity, flourishing while he suffered poverty and unfair neglect, the equipoise achieved in the writing of poems and prose works where, as he says, 'a free moment appears brand new and spacious/Where I may live beyond the reach of desire.'" Well, he wasn't alone in his resentment, God knows; but his anger was indeed quite justified. He was passed over and ignored for many years in favor of loudmouths and second-raters. Kavanagh turned his resentment into a crusade, as writers will, ended up in court more than once, and lost most of his friends. But he was the best poet of his generation, certainly in Ireland and very possibly beyond the emerald shores. "The Great Hunger," his poetic masterpiece, banned by the Church, deglamorized once and for all the rural life: the "hunger" is both alimentary and sexual. But Kavanagh feuded terribly (imagine that, an Irishman feuding), notably with Brendan Behan, who called him--referring to the onanistic allusions in his work--"the Monaghan wanker." He fell out with most of literary Dublin, too, including Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan), with whom he occasionally entered into ludicrous, whiskey-fueled slow-motion fisticuffs, usually in McDaid's Bar (Dublin's one-time writers' Mecca, off Grafton Street). Kavanagh's talent was eventually recognized, if a bit late, and by the time he died 42 years ago, in November 1967, he was regarded as something of a national monument. Now he is one, literally: The statue above depicts a bronze effigy of him sitting, as he did in life, on a bench beside the Grand Canal in Dublin, pondering life and the waters, as in the lovely "Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin":
 
O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother,
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a rock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by, head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges--
And look! A barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous 
Tomb--just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
 
Recommended soundtrack: a Schubert Impromptu or two.