Kirjahaku

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) now takes a place among the English poets. His range is wide, including the First World War, in which he served as an infantry private, the passionate celebration of his native Gloucestershire, and fears of the mental imbalance which led to his eventual confinement in a mental hospital. Out of these experiences, he made a poetry unique, vigorous, musical, and direct. This selection of over 150 of his poems, was made by the poet P.J. Kavanagh from his edition of the "Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney". It is reissued now, with a few corrected readings, and with a Chronology and Introduction to Gurney's life, by P.J. Kavanagh.

The sympathies of Vaughan and Traherne, the earth-love of Edward Thomas, the wit of Louis MacNeice, are three of the many currents that run through the verse of P.J. Kavanagh. Seven collections are included in this volume, which traces the poet through 35 years, and ends with his elegy and celebration of a landscape, "Severn Aisling".

In his foreword to this book, Derek Mahon notes that P.J. Kavanagh’s poems ‘elude the obvious categories. He has never been one of a “school”’. A poet of rural England, yet of Irish ancestry, Kavanagh ‘has always stood slightly apart’. He championed the poems of Ivor Gurney and shares with Gurney not only a personal landscape (that of Gloucestershire) but a poetic commitment to the actual and specific, to nature writing at its most rootedly precise. His is, in Mahon’s words, ‘a unique personal record’: ‘a lifetime’s dedication has produced its rich results’.