News at Eleven: Ireland is internationally famous for

its literary giants: Yeats, Beckett and Wilde among them. Less well known is the poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), though the study of his works is compulsory in Irish schools. But I've not heard of him before this week, I confess to Rosaleen Kearney, the manager of the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in the village of Iniskeen, County Monaghan. "You're not alone," she says. "Patrick Kavanagh is not well known outside Ireland, which is a pity as his poetry is as important to us as Yeats's."

from Stuff: Finding the Poetry of Old Ireland

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