When Eilis Hanrahan, a bank clerk in the Midlands discovers that her husband is to be jailed for a serious sexual assault, leaving herself and their two children to fend for themselves, her world seems on the verge of collapse.
Des Kavanagh’s poems are full of the names of people and places he knows or has known well. Names are great familiarisers and Kavanagh’s Ireland is a close and familiar place. But it also bears within it the ache of absence, not just for specific people, but for the world they inhabited, a world that made them and that they also made. Kavanagh’s ancestral Inishowen in Donegal, his family, in it’s old and new generations, often provide the pivot that turns him to the past, although it also allows for glimpses of the future, through children and grandchildren — so said the late Seamus Deane of the Galway poet.