‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they make crisp scattered pinches of soot.’ P.J. Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, plucked out this observation for one of the columns that he wrote for The Spectator between 1983 and 1996.
He was right to call a volume collecting these Life and Letters columns (with a later series from the TLS) by the name A Kind of Journal, for they possess the kind of narrative impetus that makes classic diaries such as Woodforde’s or Kilvert’s so compelling. But they were also a poet’s work-books, just as living in rural Gloucestershire, as he had since 1963, was to be in a poet’s workshop.
For, despite the success in 1966 of his classic memoir The Perfect Stranger (which set the death of his first wife, Sally, aged 24, as the abiding marker for the rest of his life), Patrick Joseph Kavanagh was before anything a poet.
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