KAVANAGH, Patrick. Ploughman and Other Poems [KAVANAGH’S FIRST WORK]

London: Macmillan, 1936. pp. 35. Printed stitched wrappers, a little sun-tanned and frayed, otherwise a very good copy. Exceedingly rare. €1,750

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), poet and novelist, was born at Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan and educated locally. He worked on his father’s small farm in the townland of Mucker, and for a time as a cobbler. He left school at thirteen and almost immediately began to ‘dabble in verse’. George Russell recognised his talent and published three poems in The Irish Statesman. In 1936 Macmillan published his first book Ploughman and Other Poems, a collection of thirty-one poems written between 1930 and 1935, which contains some of his best. ‘Inniskeen Road’ achieved great popularity: “A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king of banks and stones and every blooming thing.” Kavanagh later called it `a worthless kingdom’. This work demonstrates Kavanagh’s growth from a schoolboy poet of the late 1920’s to an accomplished literary artist. Here the poet sees various truths revealed through such natural phenomena as the twisted furrows of fields, birds in song, or late blooming trees.