The Arts: Bloomsday has been getting all the publicity, but 2004 also marks 100 years since the birth of Patrick Kavanagh. Rosita Boland reports

This is a busy year for commemorating Irish writers. As well as being the centenary of Bloomsday, the 24 hours charted in Ulysses, 2004 also marks the centenary of Patrick Kavanagh's birth. Kavanagh was born on a disputed date in October 1904, between the 21st and 23rd, in the aptly named townland of Mucker, near Inniskeen in Co Monaghan. The earthy, naturalistic place name echoes a defining Kavanagh theme: the presence and influence of the land on his work.

Kavanagh wrote two novels, The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn, several collections of poems, which include his startling epic of rural loneliness, The Great Hunger, and a collection of prose. He also worked as a gossip columnist for the Irish Press between 1942 and 1944.

It's the poems he remains best known for. The savage raw howl of The Great Hunger; Raglan Road, which the singer Luke Kelly made his own; the clarity and potency of poems such as Innocence, Memory Of My Father and To A Child. Sometimes lines glint out of certain poems, concealed there unexpectedly like self-contained haikus.

In Mermaid Tavern, "Beckett's garbage can / contains all our man." In Prelude, "you must go inland and be / lost in compassion's ecstasy, / where suffering soars in summer air - / the millstone has become a star." In Father Mat, "On the stem / of memory imaginations blossom."

Kavanagh's work is a fixture on the Leaving Certificate English syllabus. Some of those set lines have long ebbed and flowed in our collective memory: the canal water of Lines Written On A Seat On The Grand Canal, where the water is "stilly / greeny at the heart of summer"; "the wink-and-elbow language of delight" in Inniskeen Road, July Evening; the stony grey soil of Monaghan that "burgled my bank of youth" in Stony Grey Soil; "the newness that was in every stale thing / when we looked at it as children" in Advent; and in A Christmas Childhood, how he looked "and three whin bushes rode across / the horizon - the Three Wise Kings".

Kavanagh also wrote many poems best described as pedestrian, however. It could be argued that he was poorly served by the publication of the weighty Goldsmith edition of his collected poems, now out of print. Another edition is due in September, edited by Antoinette Quinn, author of a 2001 biography.

Although both his novels and Selected Poems have been available from Penguin for some time, the international jury is still out on Kavanagh, as he remains relatively unknown outside Ireland.

He himself wrote an author's note, dated 1964, that appeared in the Collected Poems edition of 1972 - a misleading title, as the poems were a selection - published by Martin Brian & O'Keeffe: "I have never been much considered by the English critics. I suppose I shouldn't say this. But for many years I have learned not to care, and I have also learned that the basis of literary criticism is usually the ephemeral."

Even Seamus Heaney, who has always acknowledged an important debt as a poet to Kavanagh, has changed his mind over time about the scope and achievement of Kavanagh's work.

In the first of two key essays, "From Monaghan to the Grand Canal: The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh", included in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, he wrote: "Much of his authority and oddity derive from the fact that he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere. . . . There is a feeling of prospector's luck - which may be deliberately achieved, but I don't think so - about many of his best effects. . . . One might say that when he had consumed the roughage of his Monaghan experience, he ate his heart out."

The second, "The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh", appeared in his 1988 collection of essays, The Government Of The Tongue. Here Heaney wrote of reading Kavanagh at 23 and of experiencing the excitement of coming across "the unregarded data of the usual life. Potato pits with rime on them", and of his "primitive delight in finding world become word." He reassessed his reading of poems he had previously interpreted as too airy or insubstantial, such as "the rinsed streamers that fly" in Prelude. "I have learned to value this poetry of inner freedom very highly," Heaney wrote. "These poems, with their grievously earned simplicity, make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading."

For all his talents, however, even in retrospect you would never call Kavanagh the most cheerful of men. When the bronze of him sitting on a bench, arms folded and looking cross, appeared by the Grand Canal in Dublin some years ago, it was immediately nicknamed the Crank on the Bank.

The most tiresome cliché of Dublin of the 1950s and 1960s has to be the one of writers boasting about excessive drinking in the pubs. By all accounts Kavanagh could be obnoxious and difficult, both in and out of the pub.

"We're not going to try and canonise the man," says Emily Cullen, the newly appointed curator and programme director of the Kavanagh centenary celebrations. She will be based at the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, in Inniskeen, until December.

At last year's annual Kavanagh weekend, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, allocated €30,000 for the temporary appointment of a curator to advise on the policy and programme for the centenary.

Cullen, whose background is in arts management, took up her post at the start of this month. Unfortunately, by the time she was appointed, deadlines for funding applications had passed. The job does not come with a budget, so Cullen will be relying on sponsorship, goodwill and local support to fund events.

Among the national events being planned by the centre are a commemorative evening at the National Concert Hall in October and a special centenary event of the Kavanagh Poetry Competition, with all 32 previous winners. There will also be a national day of readings of his work by waterways in every county, an idea inspired by Kavanagh's line "O commemorate me where there is water".

On Katherine Kavanagh's death, in 1989, she willed the rights and royalties of her husband's work to trustees, who were directed to use the money to help Irish poets in their "middle years". The trustees are Leland Bardwell, Patrick MacEntee, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eunan O'Halpin and Macdara Woods. Among those who have received the Patrick and Katherine Fellowship in poetry, an occasional award, are Susan Connolly, Ciaran O'Driscoll and Maurice Scully.

To mark the centenary this year, the trust is staging a rehearsed reading of The Great Hunger in October. The venue, a Dublin theatre, is being finalised. It will also be awarding €8,000 fellowships this year.

"Looking back, I see that the big tragedy for the poet is poverty," Kavanagh wrote. He could only be pleased that a few of his famous eternal standing army of poets will be somewhat better off, in monetary terms, by the end of this year.