Just Finished Reading: The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh [50pp] 

So.... Poetry..... AGAIN! I think that both Penguin Classics boxsets are trolling me presently. Weirdly, and very unexpectedly, I didn’t mind these poems. I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I didn’t skim a single one.  

I’m not sure exactly why this was so. Generally, the poetry is about the natural world (in his Irish home) with multiple references to mountains, trees and such. By far the longest poem – hence the title of the booklet – was The Great Hunger itself. Going in I’d assumed that it was going to be about the Irish Potato Famine, but it was nothing of the sort. It was instead about the struggles of a farmer, tied to the land and to his overbearing mother leaving him alone in the world as both he and the land ages. It was, to coin a phrase, all very poetic. 

Whilst I’m not exactly going out and buying all of this poet’s works, I certainly wasn’t sorry that I read them and don’t consider my time wasted doing so. I don’t think that I’ve finally been ‘turned on’ to poetry, but that I’ve stumbled across a poet that doesn’t leave me cold, bored and confused with his use of language. We’ll see how the NEXT poet in either of these boxsets' fares! Reasonable.