No relation to Patrick Kavanagh, Sussex-born poet P.J. Kavanagh (author of the touching memoir The Perfect Stranger) nonetheless has Irish connections and describes himself in the Times Literary Supplement as "a besotted and frequent visitor" to our green and sometimes pleasant land.
Besotted is certainly the word for it, not to mention completely over-the-top: "There is something Heroic about Ireland," he grandly declares, ". . . everything, even its wearisome literary quarrels, seems pitched on a heroic scale."
He obviously wasn't in McDaid's too often during the bad old times. Wearisome the literary quarrels definitely were (and still are, though no longer in McDaid's) but so far from heroic as to make one nod vigorously at Hugh Leonard's assertion that "a literary movement in Ireland is two writers on speaking terms with each other".
Yet Mr Kavanagh persists with his argument: "Ireland is also heroic, or at least grand-scale, in its new prosperity." This is the prosperity whose seeds were planted in the Dublin of the Sixties - the decade when developers razed Hume Street and Molesworth Street to the ground, and on which Thomas Kinsella cast a baleful eye in his 1968 poem, Phoenix Park:
Dublin, the umpteenth city of confusion . . .
A theatre for the quick articulate,
The agonized genteel, their artful watchers . . .
Malice as entertainment. Asinine feast
Of sowthistles and brambles! And there dead men,
Half hindered by dead men, tear down dead beauty.
There are some of us who think that this is what they're still doing, though now, of course, it's in a good cause - to cram more tourists into newly-built giant hotels and more teenagers into newly-built vast drinking emporiums - and it's sanctified by the name of the Celtic Tiger.
Mr Kavanagh doesn't mention this all-devouring beast, being too busy being besotted by our heroic ways.
Still on heroism, there's something heroically simple about the poems of James Laughlin. That's not meant to sound patronising, because the best of his lyrics have a lovely, unforced directness about them.
Born eighty-three years ago in Pittsburgh, where his Irish ancestor set up a steel manufacturing company, James eschewed the family business to become a publisher, establishing New Directions Press, in whose pages the work of such poets as Pound, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas and Denise Levertov appeared.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was obviously an enterprising and versatile man, developing the Alta ski resort in Utah and working for the Ford Foundation as a "cultural scout" in Asia.
I mention him here both because he has just died and because a few weeks before his death the Dedalus Press published a slim volume of his entitled The Lost Fragments. John F. Deane of Dedalus thinks him "one of the world's joy-givers," and would like him remembered, as indeed he should be. Here's a little poem called Old Men:
Old men fall in love
With young girls readily.
They have dear memories they'd like
To relive while still they can.
Be kind to them, maidens.
The day may come when
You'll understand what it is
To need to recapture
The raptures of the past.
You'll have read in this newspaper last Monday that first prize in the 1997 RTE Radio Francis MacManus Competition was won by veteran Irish actor, producer and RTE Rep stalwart Barry Cassin for his story "Ghost", but some of the other winners (drawn from over 800 entries) are intriguing, too.
Second prize, for instance, went to Maria Behan, who was born in New York of Irish and Italian parents and graduated from Columbia University before coming to Ireland two years ago to write. Her winning story, "After Life", is her first fiction to be published - or, rather, broadcast (on Radio 1 at the end of the month).
Ivy Bannister, whose "What Is There, Only Life or Death?", who won fourth prize, is also a New Yorker, though living in this country since 1970. No stranger to the Francis MacManus competition, she has made it to the final shortlist on four previous occasions, and last year Poolbeg published Magician, a collection of her stories.
Alas, Francis MacManus himself seems currently out of favour - indeed, has been since his untimely death in 1965 at the age of fifty-six. But the novels of this Kilkenny writer have a quiet strength that should ensure his revival. Or, in an age when hysterical hype seems more important than literary worth, is that just wishful thinking?