A man's mother can be a terrible burden sometimes. For Tarry Flynn - poet, farmer and lover-from-afar of beautiful young virgins - the responsibility of family, farm, poetic inspiration and his own unyielding lust is a heavy one. The only solution is to rise above all - or escape over the nearest horizon. Like The Green Fool, his autobiography, Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn is an idyllic and beautifully evocative account of life as it was lived in Ireland earlier this century.

Time hardly mattered in the village of Mucker, the birthplace of poet and writer Patrick Kavanagh. Full of wry humour, Kavanagh s unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish rural upbringing describes a patriarchal society surviving on the edge of poverty, sustained by the land and an insatiable love of gossip. There are tales of schoolboy skirmishes, blackberrying and night-time salmon-poaching; of country-weddings and fairs, of political banditry and religious pilgrimages; and of farm-work in the fields and kicking mares. Kavanagh s experiences inspired him to write poetry which...

The centenary of Patrick Kavanagh's birth in 2004 provides the ideal opportunity to reappraise one of modern Ireland's greatest poets. From a harsh, humble background that he himself described so brilliantly, Kavanagh burst through immense constraints to redefine Irish poetry - a poetry appropriate for a fully independent country, both politically and culturally. Moving beyond Irish verse's preoccupation with history, national politics and identity, he turned to the land and scenery of his native Inniskeen, portraying the closely-observed minutiae of everyday rural and urban life in an...