Patrick Kavanagh was born in Dublin in 1950. He emigrated to County Cork in the mid-1960s to attend the local Jesuit secondary school. He trained as a teacher at University College Cork where he graduated with a BEd degree in 1972. Patrick taught English at the high school for three years before he turned to full-time writing
His first collection of poems, The Wolf Road, was published in 1975 and won the Samuel Beckett Award, later reprinted in an American edition by New Directions Books. His second collection, The Black Veil: A Sequence of Poems (1980), which is concerned with sexual and social issues and his experiences both as a gay man and as a teacher, was published by Peter Lang.
Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.Patrick Kavanagh
The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.Patrick Kavanagh
