When not buying islands, digging up dead saints and entertaining the likes of Theodore Roethke, Richard Murphy found time to write poetry that captures the essence of the west of Ireland, writes Eugene O'Connell.

Richard Murphy is tetchy when I meet him in the foyer of the Glasshouse Hotel in Sligo. He's had words with the manager over the piped music - "counter cultural and a soporific to ease the pain of the staff".

He's lost the argument so we go across the road to the cafe of the Yeats Memorial Building where there's more piped music. He looks frailer in the less flattering morning-after light, is tired but pleased at the reaction from a packed audience to his reading the night before at the Model Arts and Niland gallery.

Murphy has turned 80 and is guest poet at this year's Yeats International Summer School; a cake was wheeled in to celebrate the occasion and there were drinks after at the aforementioned Glasshouse Hotel.

Murphy is impeccably mannered, refers me time and again to his memoir The Kick: A Life Among Writers, a warts-and-all account of the great and the good he mixed with in a life that's described on the blurb as "strangely eventful".

Born in Ceylon, his father was mayor of Colombo, the capital city of the colony that is now Sri Lanka. He was brought to Ireland at the age of six and grew up in the Anglo Irish ancestral home at Milford near Shrule, on the Mayo-Galway border.

After periods in Kylemore Abbey and Dublin he was educated mostly at public schools in England and went on to study at Oxford. His decision to pack in a job at Lloyds and come to Ireland to write poetry shocked his family.

A chance meeting with Patricia Avis, a wealthy heiress, changed his life. The couple married in 1955 and bought Lake Park, a regency house on 200 acres near Roundwood in Co Wicklow, from Ernest Gebler and Edna O'Brien.

"Not a good place for wives," he remembers, "a wife drowned herself in the lake a hundred years ago and Gebler's first wife absconded with their son and sent him divorce papers from Reno."

They had one daughter Emily but divorced in 1959 because of financial and other difficulties; there is a frank account in The Kick of infidelity on both their parts.

A chance meeting with Tony White, a writer/actor who had retired to Inishbofin, led to their renovating an old Galway hooker (The Ave Maria), which was lying desolate in the harbour, with the idea of sailing around the world.

A hunch that there might be an opening for fishing and adventure cruises to the islands proved so successful that they renovated another boat, and much-needed tourist revenue began to flow into the region.

The creative juices also began to flow. The celebrated trilogy Sailing to an Island, The Battle of Aughrim and High Island were published by Faber publishing house. Murphy's growing international reputation and exotic lifestyle began to attract stars of stage and screen. Sylvia Plath tried to seduce Murphy during one infamous visit; her husband Ted Hughes would later become Murphy's best friend. Theodore Roethke, the famous American poet, refused to leave Inishbofin and had to be carted off to Ballinasloe mental hospital after one week-long drinking bout.

"It was one of those times when certain types of people come together and things happen," says Murphy. "Peter O'Toole and Robert Shaw were forever trying to outdo each other; O'Toole applied for permission to build a house higher up the hill than Shaw - he was refused planning permission so he blew the top of the hill with explosives."

Murphy's innate interest in stone, coupled with his desire to conserve the pink granite of the old ruins of the area, saw him build the famous pink house on the pier at Cleggan and a house in the shape of a hexagon on Omey Island.

"I bought the ruins of the village of Aughrisbeg, little hunger, to save the pink granite from being dumped into the foundations of bungalows," says Murphy. His own theory on poetry is linked to the idea of building; he believes a poem should be a construct like the human body or a house "that has a definite infrastructure to contain the elements of a poem, to keep the emotions in check".

The Price of Stone, one of his major books, consists of 50 sonnets written from the persona or point of view of a house. He writes sonnets (he is considered a master of the form) because they have "the rigour and shape of a well-built wall".

High Island, the last book of what he calls "this purple period", reflects on the human condition, and the demons that drove him. "I bought [ High Island] quite cheaply as you would in those days. There was no place to land, you had to jump off the boat, on to a rock and scale the cliff face." Murphy spent long periods on his own in the beehive cell of St Feichin on the island. "The storm petrels were unnerving and the human cries of the seals . . . We actually found the bones of St Feichin and the eight hermits who lived there. St Feichin was said to sleep naked on the bare stone in atonement for his sins."

He shrugs off a question about the afterlife; he is determinedly agnostic: "this Yeatsian nonsense of the last years being that of soul-making doesn't interest me in the slightest".

RICHARD MURPHY LEFT Cleggan in 1980 after Tony White's sudden death at the age of 46. "I went to Sri Lanka to escape from the wretched treadmill of talks and residencies in those infernal universities in America. The Tamil war had just broken out with the Indian government. I stumbled into this fortress, Sigiriya, and couldn't believe my eyes."

Murphy remembered his mother talking about the frescoes painted on the sheer cliff face of Sigiriya, prehistoric murals of naked women seducing the gods so that their semen would rain down to fertilise the earth.

Oblivious to the atrocities, the increasing mayhem of the war around him - he escaped kidnap on a number of occasions - he began a five-month study of the murals and the 1,000-year-old graffiti that visitors had inscribed on the wall.

The book that emerged, The Mirror Wall, was a new departure from the formal well-controlled lyric that is the hallmark of his earlier work. Almost as an aside to the literary work, the embattled poet managed to rescue five Sri Lankan boys orphaned by the war. He relocated them to Ireland.

Richard Murphy lives in South Africa now with his daughter Emily "because she likes the outdoor life". He's not involved with the literary scene there, and detects the same inertia among the white population of South Africa now as he detected among the islanders of the west of Ireland in the 1960s.

"Never mind the bum notes, keep the music going until the end", is the advice he gives to writers, before waving me away from the Glasshouse Hotel, which uses the words rest room instead of toilets on the bathroom doors.

'"Who do they think they are," I can hear Murphy mumble - there's life in the old dog yet.