Patrick Kavanagh Awards 2008

The Annual Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Awards 2008 took place last night Friday 28th November at the opening of the Annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend in the poet’s native village of Inniskeen.

The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award now in its 37th year has been given in the past to many poets who have gone on to make considerable reputations for themselves.  It is in many ways the most crucial award in Irish poetry, since it honours and recognises a poet at the beginning of her/his career.

Terence O’Rourke of KPMG has generously sponsored the Award again this year. Terence is a son of Clinton and Emily O’Rourke, Inniskeen. Emily was a former member and Treasurer of the Patrick Kavanagh Society and continues to be an enthusiastic supporter of these events.

Judges’ Remarks

The Judges’ Report is as follows:
The Award continues to attract a large number of entries, many of a high standard.  We had the pleasure of reading many wonderful individual poems, but had to remind ourselves constantly that the prize is, in the end, for a manuscript.

At a time when darkness seems everywhere about us, it is heartening to realize that so many people retain their belief in the power of language to instruct and heal, that so many are still willing and able to reflect on matters of spirit, body and soul. Patrick Kavanagh made his enduring luminous poems at an even darker time in the history of Ireland, at a time, it might be said, when poverty and emigration seemed to be draining the very lifeblood of the people. If things are not that bad in our present crisis, it is nevertheless salutary and steadying to have had the pleasure of encountering through their work so many who still put their faith in the attempt to find deeper truths in language.  To quote Jeannette Winterson in a recent article, “Language is what stops the heart exploding.”

1st Prize
The overall winner was Geraldine Mitchell from Co. Mayo with her manuscript WORLD WITHOUT MAPS. It is only fair to say that the distance between the first and second prize-winners this year was unprecedentedly close, but this entry shaded it by virtue of poems that are lucid, technically accomplished, at times daring, at times salvific. These are the poems of a considered and considering intelligence, surefooted, meditative and clear. One is in the presence of a clear-eyed sensibility that considers, but does not judge, human fallibility.

The poems draw strength from understatement, and the poet has the courage to leave gaps in the narrative.  In poetry, as in conversation, the unsaid is often more eloquent than what is said. It is across the carefully constructed gaps that the imagination of the reader takes flight, that the intelligence of the reader is engaged.  The language of these poems is succinct, the imagery crisp and, again, the poet has the confidence to allow the images and rhythms to work their chemistry upon us without too much commentary.  In the best of these poems we are left with an image which resonates and opens out into mystery - something which is at the core of the poetic.

2nd Prize
2nd Prize went to David McLoghlin with his collection, entitled WAITING FOR SAINT BRENDAN. These are big, ambitious, sometimes sprawling poems, rich in narrative and in detail, an autobiography of sorts, where the voyaging soul is concerned to find home and meaning in a dialogue between self and other. Like Saint Brendan, the author seems to understand that if home is where you set out from, home is also where you hope to find journey’s end.

Yet, if the title poem draws on the mythological, these poems are surely rooted in our century of migration and displacement, where identities are negotiated as much as given. It is the candid engagement with the difficult choices and trade-offs made in a search for some omphalos, some centre, in an ever more shifting world, which energizes this collection.

3rd Prize
This year we have decided to break with tradition, and award the third prize jointly to two collections:  Jim Maguire, Wexford Town with his manuscript entitled PIANO LESSONS, and Cormac O’Leary, Co. Leitrim with his manuscript  entitled SIGNS ON A WHITEFIELD.

PIANO LESSONS is a tightly-controlled and disciplined set of meditations, the first section revolving around and drawing light from music as fact and as metaphor. It is ambitious in taking as a central theme “the language where language ends” - this is a brave and successful opening out of music through poetry. Here, we are drawn in by the precise detail we are given of the musician’s world. A number of poems relating to seafaring open the second section - a very different imagery but no less precisely rendered.

SIGNS ON A WHITEFIELD is a loving evocation of times and people past, rich in anecdote, shot through with illuminating insights and images. The poems of place successfully resist the tug of nostalgia and, as with the poems in ‘Waiting for St. Brendan’, a number of them reflect for us the unsettled decade in which we are now living, where mobility is a given and a small street in an Irish city can play host to many nationalities.  In the compassionate and tender poems of loss at the end of the collection it is again, perhaps, the writer’s detachment and ability to trust the images which allow the poems to impact on the reader’s sensibility.

Both authors will, we are sure, go far in the craft.

Moya Cannon
Theo Dorgan

November 2008

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