Taking Flight

"Love Letter To The Hospital" by Annemarie Ní Churreáin

How can a poem transform darkness into light? How can it hold together the ghosts of trauma and survival? In A Love Letter To The Hospital, Donegal poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin visits St James’ Hospital in Dublin 08 to reconnect with the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh who underwent surgery in 1955 for the removal of a lung. In this essay, Ní Churreáin reflects upon Kavanagh’s influence upon her own poetic explorations of landscape, history and the mysteries at the heart of human suffering.

Broadcast on RTE Lyric FM Friday 8th October at 11am as part of Niall Carroll’s Classical Daytime.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet.  Her latest collection ‘The Poison Glen’ is out now on Gallery Press.

'Gulder, foosey, splinc & crig: Kavanagh's Lost Language' by Manchán Magan

A patchwork of linguistic influences surrounded Patrick Kavanagh growing up in rural Monaghan, from Elizabethan English to Gaelic Irish, and Ulster Scots. Manchán Magan explores the visible and invisible impact these had on Kavanagh’s poetry.

Broadcast on RTE Lyric FM Friday 15th October at 11am as part of Niall Carroll’s Classical Daytime.

Manchán Magan is a writer and broadcaster.

‘Kavanagh, The Great Hunger, and Me’ by Jaki McCarrick

In “Kavanagh, The Great Hunger and me”, writer Jaki McCarrick discusses her personal relationship with the work of Patrick Kavanagh and how it helped root her at a formative age in the border town her family had moved to from London. Read by Jaki herself, the essay moves organically from past to present, from Kavanagh’s life to McCarrick’s own.

Broadcast on RTE Lyric FM Friday 22nd October at 11am as part of Niall Carroll’s Classical Daytime.

Jaki McCarrick is a writer and academic.

'The Meadow' - by Tadhg O’Sullivan

Two fields over from a small lake, in the lee of a gentle hill, a small acre is cut out of a small parish. This meadow is bounded on one side by hedgerow and trees; on another by a quiet road; on another by a stream; on the last the small house that I was born in.

A radio essay based around the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, The Meadow is written in the voice of unnamed fictional character, whose long life has been lived in the rhythms and sounds of a place deeply known.

Broadcast on RTE Lyric FM Friday 29th October at 11am as part of Niall Carroll’s Classical Daytime.

Tadhg O’Sullivan is a film-maker and artist.

Narrated by Eleanor Methven

'The Dawning of the Day' by Michael Glennon

In the Autumn of 1944, the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the young medical student Hilda Moriarty forged a close and somewhat unlikely connection. The pairing of the two, and their frequent sighting around Dublin city centre, proved a source of bafflement to many and would eventually inspire the poem and song On Raglan Road. The Dawning of The Day is a feature length radio documentary that draws upon correspondence between the pair, a whole series of Hilda inspired Kavanagh poems and new interviews with key players. In a story that crosses between Dublin, West Kerry, Limerick and Hollywood it provides new insight and detail into what is often perceived as one of the great songs of unrequited love. Contributors include Hilda’s son, the actor Daragh O’Malley, John Sheahan of The Dubliners, singer songwriter Billy Bragg and the Kavanagh scholar Dr Una Agnew. The actor Declan Gorman reads extracts from Kavanagh’s poetry and correspondence. Archival audio from sources including Luke Kelly and Paul Durcan also features.

Presented by Mike Glennon

Produced by Mike Glennon

Producer for RTÉ Lyric FM: Eoin O Kelly

The Dawning of The Day was co-produced and co-funded by Creative Monaghan & The Patrick Kavanagh Centre.

Mike Glennon is a musician, music historian and creative arts lecturer.

‘The Dawning of the Day’ was first broadcast on RTE Lyric FM at 6pm on Sunday 18th December 2022.

The Healing Stone by Annemarie NíChurreáin

Inspired by Kavanagh’s Lough Derg (1942), Donegal poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin visits St Patrick’s Purgatory, the ancient pilgrimage site on Station Island in Lough Derg, County Donegal, Ireland, to explore the wild beauty of the island, and reawaken the hag of Lough Derg. Sound design by Daragh Dukes.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021) and Ghostgirl (Donegal County Archives, 2023). She is the recipient of an Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award. Ní Churreáin is the current poetry editor at The Stinging Fly Magazine – Ireland’s leading literary journal. www.studiotwentyfive.com

Greyscale by Scott McKendry

GREYSCALE

This essay by Belfast poet Scott McKendry revisits his first encounters with the work of Patrick Kavanagh. Touching on the hard knocks of working-class Irish suburbia, childhood agoraphobia, Steamboat Willie (1928) starring Mickey Mouse, and early 2000s chatroom culture, McKendry considers the relationship between screen media and Kavanagh’s oft neglected snail poems. What happens to one Monaghan-man’s rural meditations fed through the mangle of a city kid’s experience? Do the poor have a propitious use for poetry? Are the fears of a recluse ever justified? As the virtual bleeds into the tangible and vice versa, McKendry foregrounds the grey – black & white video footage, snail skin, ethical ambiguity – to make the red parts potent.

Narrated by Scott McKendry

Produced by Daragh Dukes and The Patrick Kavanagh Centre

BIO McKendry

Scott McKendry is from North Belfast. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. His pamphlet, Curfuffle (Lifeboat, 2019), was a Poetry Book Society Autumn Choice. In 2019, McKendry won a Patrick Kavanagh Award. In 2024 he was chosen by Paul Muldoon as Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Poet of Promise. His debut collection, GUB, is out now with Corsair (Little, Brown).

The First Punk Poet

In “The First Punk Poet”, Sons of Southern Ulster posit the notion that Patrick Kavanagh may have influenced the children of the Irish diaspora that formed the cornerstone of the punk rock movement a decade or so after his death. Interspersed with snippets of song and of memory, they describe a small town border existence in the dark days of the late seventies and early eighties and recall a teacher who introduced a class of bored teenagers to Kavanagh with the words “he’s one of our own”. Decades removed from those southern Ulster roots – the ghosts of the past remain.

Contributors: Justin Kelly, David Meagher, Daragh Dukes

SONS OF SOUTHERN ULSTER
Formed around a songwriting partnership between Justin Kelly and David Meagher, Sons of Southern Ulster perform songs that are heavily influenced by their formative experience of growing up in the town of Bailieborough, Co. Cavan

The Land of A Hundred Little Hills by Ceol Connected

Thomas Johnston, artistic director gives an insight into the creative process involved in bringing an idea from page to stage.  Commissioned to develop a drama loosely inspired by Patrick Kavanaghs poem ‘A Christmas Childhood’.

Thomas and his theatre company Ceol Connected devised ‘The Land of a Hundred Little Hills’, a play for young audiences about a young mans search for ‘wonder’ which he somehow lost on his way to adulthood and yet seemed to be so abundant when he was a child playing with his friends among the little hills of Monaghan.

CEOL CONNECTED

Ceol Connected produces magical traditional music, puppetry & storytelling experiences for children

Eternal Lanes of Joy

Eternal Lanes of Joy recreates Patrick Kavanagh’s epic journey on foot from his home in County Monaghan to Dublin, in the year 1931. This was a pilgrimage of sorts – a symbolic journey that would affirm his idea of himself as a poet.

When he reached Dublin, he went directly to the house of George Russell, or AE, as he was known. Russell had already published some of Kavanagh’s poems in ‘The Irish Statesman’, and would become one of Kavanagh’s guiding lights. He gave the visiting poet an anthology of Japanese poetry as well as books by Dostoevsky, Melville and James Stephens, among others.

Eternal Lanes of Joy weaves together Kavanagh’s writings, dramatised scenes, new writing, archive sources, and a rich soundtrack – of footsteps, nature and all that we imagine Kavanagh may have heard along the way.

We begin in the year 1962 – in a TV studio in RTÉ when Kavanagh – then in his late fifties – is speaking to camera for the Self Portrait series.

Mikel Murfi plays Patrick Kavanagh, both as the poet on the road and the older Kavanagh looking back.

For more, credits etc.
https://www.rte.ie/radio/dramaonone/1503727-eternal-lanes-of-joy-by-pat-collins