All Kavanagh's gifts are on display, as Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction to this new selection of 40 poems spanning 30 years of Patrick Kavanagh's career. In truth, these gifts were hard-won, from his earliest self-taught verses after leaving primary school at the age of 13, to his refusal of sanitized pastoral depictions of rural Ireland while living among Dublin's literary elite, to his transcendent later poems written in the wake of an operation to remove one of his lungs after a cancer diagnosis. Throughout his life, Patrick Kavanagh would carve out a place for himself as one of...