Patrick Kavanagh is the Catholic poet we should be reading this Advent
Paul Corcoran writes in America Magazine:
In his lifetime, Patrick Kavanagh considered it a dubious honour to be reckoned the best Irish poet since William Butler Yeats; he took it to mean “the second best Irish poet after Yeats.” Since Kavanagh’s death in 1967, he and Yeats have been joined in the pantheon of Irish poets by Seamus Heaney, who throughout his life was evangelical in the cause of promoting Kavanagh’s work beyond the shores of Ireland. According to Heaney, it was Kavanagh, the farmer-turned-poet, who “kick[ed] the dead weight of the familiar into life” and inspired Heaney to make poetry out of the seemingly innocuous details of everyday life.
Link to article:
Patrick Kavanagh – The Catholic poet…
The depth of spirituality in Kavanaghs’s poetry highlights an earthy incarnational understanding. John Paul 2 wrote that ‘the Incarnation has divinised culture’. Kavanagh had spotted this earth divinity showing it in his writings. Earth is a blessed thing as Metz would write in Theology of the World.