Kind of Journal
Published on 24. April 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-1-85754-632-3 (ISBN)
Description
In 1983 the poet P.J. Kavanagh was asked by the Spectator to write a weekly column, for a month. Thirteen years later he was still at it, though now writing longer, monthly pieces. When he moved to The Times Literary Supplement he continued the process of helping to revive and revitalise the once-popular form of the wide-ranging essay. Peter Levi said he was "at his best as good as Hazlitt". "If description is revelation," Derek Mahon said of Kavanagh's poems, "his revelatory gift is prodigious", and many of these pieces are like that in their inventive clarity, their just enthusiasm. They add up to a kind of journal, a life shared.
More details
Person
P.J. KAVANAGH was born in England in 1931. Wounded in the Korean war, he later went to Oxford. He has worked as a lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist and has written novels, two volumes of autobiography and essays, and edited anthologies. His name is closely associated with the poetry of Ivor Gurney, a seminal edition of whose work he prepared in 1982. Carcanet publish two books of his poems and The Perfect Stranger.