'I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided . . .' By turns comical, grouchy and exalted, and including his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger', some of the key poems by the writer who transformed Anglo-Irish verse. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.

Nearly one-half of the poems by the popular Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) have religious themes, images, or allusions. Here Fr. Tom Stack has collected all of these 138 poems and includes extensive introductions and commentaries about them. "

My part of Ireland had a poet at one time, a poor ragged fellow whom no respectable person whom no respectable person would be seen talking to, but he left doors open as he passed. Time hardly mattered in the village of Mucker, the birthplace of poet and writer Patrick Kavanagh. Full of wry humour, Kavanagh's unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish rural upbringing describes a patriarchal society surviving on the edge of poverty, sustained by the land and an insatiable love of gossip. There are tales of schoolboy skirmishes, blackberrying and night-time salmon-poaching; of country-weddings and fairs, of political banditry and religious pilgrimages; and of farm-work in the fields and kicking mares. Kavanagh's experiences inspired him to write poetry which immortalized a fast-disappearing way of life and brought him recognition as one of Ireland's great poets.

In the literary tradition of "The Shipping News" and "The Bird Artist", this debut work evokes a world suffused with images and presences of spirits and saints, the drowned and the saved, during the Feast of St. John in 1948.

P.J.Kavanagh's poems are filled with praise, with the minute observations that transform a mood, or the dazzling recollection that can change the heart. 'If description is revelation,' wrote Derek Mahon in the Irish Times, 'his revelatory gift is prodigious. Now is the time to read P.J.Kavanagh.' The contents of seven collections are included in this comprehensive volume, which traces the poet through three and a half decades and ends with his remarkable human elegy and celebration of a beloved landscape, 'Severn Aisling', described by Frank Kermode as 'quite magnificent.'

The country was electrified as Costello's masterful, relentless cross-examination dissected Kavanagh's public and private life, and revealed the tensions within Dublin's literary circle in the 1950s. --

In this critical assessment of Irish poet Kavanagh (1905-1967), Quinn draws out the essential poetry and prose and explains the importance of his work within the contexts of Kavanagh's life, the socio- religious life of the community, and the literary history of modern Ireland.