Half-Day Warriors

By: John Kavanagh

€8.88 €4.44

Half-Day Warriors is the second collection from Listowel Writers' Week prizewinner, John Kavanagh. Fintan O'Toole described Kavanagh's first collection, Etchings (Salmon, 1991), as 'a graceful entrance ... a pen that seems to seek the escape of romanticism only to be denied it by a knowledge of the way of the world which will not allow for false escape routes. The tension between that desire and that knowledge gi...

ISBN	1 897648 55 3
Pub Date	Friday, January 01, 1999
Cover Image	Brenda Dermody
Page Count	64
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Half-Day Warriors is the second collection from Listowel Writers' Week prizewinner, John Kavanagh. Fintan O'Toole described Kavanagh's first collection, Etchings (Salmon, 1991), as 'a graceful entrance ... a pen that seems to seek the escape of romanticism only to be denied it by a knowledge of the way of the world which will not allow for false escape routes. The tension between that desire and that knowledge gives these poems a drama all of their own'. With Half-Day Warriors John Kavanagh brings to his readers a maturing and developing talent, with which he continues to explore his favourite themes: the energies and impulses, the gains and losses of love; a highly developed awareness of a sense of place in the post-modern world; and, a growing awareness of the tension between inner and outer, private and public worlds.

John Kavanagh

John Kavanagh is from Sligo. Blue Room is his third collection from Salmon following Etchings and Half-Day Warriors. He is a winner of the Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Award. He is also a playwright with five plays produced to date in Ireland and the US. His audio book The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats (Naxos Audio) won the Spoken Word Award in the UK.

Moonfall

for Matt O'Dowd

On days when the moon is in fall and all is dark,
the sites of pilgrimage are plundered,
the gates of sanctuaries forced
and everything that is magical and sacred
is stripped down to barograph and histogram
by masters of the single vision.

Then, those who feel fatigued and faceless,
bronchitic with the weight of life
and the living of it, stumble breathlessly on
lactic with unreasonable expectation,
rained on by cacophony of signal and noise
from satellite and microchip

or paralysed by guilt
from vocation ignored or sin
too readily committed while traversing the path
wearily await poultice and panacea
and awakening from Newton's dreary sleep.

Other Titles from John Kavanagh

Blue Room

€12.00

Half-Day Warriors / John Kavanagh