KAVANAGH, Patrick. The Great Hunger (Rare first edition limited to 250 copies only)

Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1942. pp. 33, [3]. Publishers quarter linen on blue paper boards. Printed title. Limited to 250 copies, set in Caslon type and printed by Esther Ryan and Maire Gill. Covers lightly faded and rubbed at corners, otherwise a very good copy.  A great opportunity to acquire this rare fine copy.

First edition, first issue of Kavanagh’s masterpiece – considered by many critics to be the greatest Irish long poem of the twentieth century. Written in 1941, The Great Hunger is a stark and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in Ireland, centred around the figure of Patrick Maguire, a bachelor farmer whose life is one of sexual repression, unfulfilled longing, and grinding agricultural drudgery.

Kavanagh’s bleak realism shocked contemporary readers; the Irish Times refused to review the book, while Lord Longford denounced it as “a slander on the Irish nation.” Today, however, the poem is recognised as Kavanagh’s crowning achievement, a profound modernist meditation on isolation, desire, and the sterility of Irish peasant life.

Printed by the Cuala Press in the midst of wartime shortages, the edition is restricted to only 250 copies, making it one of the scarcest and most desirable works in the canon of twentieth-century Irish literature.

[L4 8E]