But my favourite poems are the ones about his grandad. They remind me so much of my grandad (not biological, he adopted my dad.. but still my grandad) who people would have said was a very angry man and didn’t seem to show any affection to anyone. But if you looked at his actions you would see how much he cared. I’ve only seen my dad cry 3 times outside of deaths. 1 was when I bought him a guitar and the next two were during these two poems. Not because they are sad but because they reminded him of his dad so much and how much he really cared.
His descriptions of a child’s room in the dark is amazing as well.
For me, it’d have to be Patrick Kavanagh. He was an Irish 20th century poet, who wrote a lot about sex, shame and religious doubt - and was one of the most evocative linguists of his generation. He’s most famous for his epic poems, like The Great Hunger and On Raglan Road. Kavanagh was one of the few Irish poets who wrote about tilling the land and the struggles of the Irish peasants, and lived the life he wrote about. Most of his contemporaries had grown up in urban, Middle Class families and were writing about these topics without knowing the realities of poor, farming communities. Kav was the exception, and that unsentimental intimacy with the Irish landscape and village life really shines through in his work.
Poetry helped keep me alive when I was in college as it was very cathartic. Though I have many favorites, Arthur Rimbaud has always been my poetic hero. Maybe it was his tragic life, or maybe that while I was in college, my life was similar to his, sex, drugs, being used by other males, and of course, writing poetry.
Back when we had a poetry thread in Finished Stories, I had posted some of my college poems, one which was "Drunken Boat Revisited which I wrote when I was 21. It ended,