Let me start by saying I am sick of myself.  Sick of promoting myself.  Sick of seeing myself and encouraging news of myself so I have decided to use my blog page here instead to highlight Irish writers past and present.  These are writers I grew up reading and hearing about, writers whose words have tinkled the ivory keys of my own heart and left music writ there forever to hum along through blood and mind like the sound of a brook after fresh rain.  Writer number one; for no particular reason other than he has been on my mind of late is Patrick Kavanagh.   Kavanagh was born in the townland of Mucker near the village of Inniskeen, County Monaghan on the border of Northern Ireland, 21 Oct 1904, not more than a half hours drive from my own home in County Tyrone.  He was the 4th eldest of ten children raised and worked on a farm by his father, a simple man who doubled as a shoemaker.  By the age of thirteen, a voracious reader, Kavanagh was done with school and worked the farm with his dad.  He was writing poetry already but didn’t see his first piece published until he was twenty four.  He continued on the farm restlessly for the next ten years before saying, to hell with this I need to be a writer, and at the age of 34 jumped on a ship for London.  Well he didn’t last long there, with their long faces and murderous glances, he decided he’d be better off among his own crowd and five months later he returned to settle in Dublin.  He was an awful hoore for the drink, our Pat, and could be seen staggering from pub to pub down O’Connell St on any given day. But he wrote like a brute publishing his first major poem The Great Hunger at the age of 38.  It was a work that sparked immediate controversy due to it’s masturbating protagonist Patrick Maguire and was seized and banned upon pressure from the Catholic church for it’s indency.  Kavanagh continued to write and to drink so that by the time he was fifty although he’d kept writing and publishing here and there along the way he was a mess, a nasty drunk of some repute, the drink was robbing him of his gifts, “Alcohol is the enemy of creativity.”  he said.  In 1954 at the age of 50 he was diagnosed with cancer and had one lung removed, the experience shook some life back into him and he settled into a period of renewed vigor and  a more grounded period of writing, giving lectures at home and in America, he even married his long time companion Katherine and saw the publication of Kavanaghs Collected Poems, where he wrote “A man innocently dabbles in rhymes and words and finds that it is his life.”  The same year he fell ill during the opening performance of a play based on his first banned novel “Tarry Flynn” and he died a week later at the age of 63.   In Feb 2002 actor Russel Crowe, a fan of Kavanaghs, throttled the producer of the Bafta awards in London after they cut short Crowes recital of a four line Kavanagh poem, “To be a poet and not know the trade/ To be a lover and repel all women/Twin ironies by which great saints are made/The agonising pincer jaws of heaven.”  Kavanagh would have enjoyed the controversy no doubt.  He might also have chuckled that a statue of him resides now in Disney World outside the bar Raglan Road, called for his most famous and enduring poem to date.  To hear renditions of Raglan Road by the likes of  Luke Kelly, Dire Straits and my personal current favorite Sinead O’Connor go to You Tube and have a  listen, you won’t be disapointed, Kavanaghs poetry has risen from the dirt and will live on.