There was more than one famous Paddy having their name celebrated yesterday. Forget your man with the funny robes and the interesting way with snakes, and think instead of canal banks and the stony grey soil of Monaghan. Since 1968, friends of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who had died the previous year, have gathered on the banks of the Grand Canal at Mespil Road each March 17th to pay tribute to the poet.
Yesterday afternoon, some 50 people turned up for the occasion. They gathered round the stone and wooden bench which was put up in memory of Kavanagh, and which has his poem Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal carved on it.
This stretch of the canal was a favourite haunt of Kavanagh's, and there are now two benches on opposite sides of the canal to commemorate him. The bench put up by friends has been there since 1968, and the other one went up in the last decade, complete with a life-size statue of the poet sitting on it, looking moodily into the water.
Sitting on the bench having a picnic lunch, waiting for the speech to begin, was Paddy Finnegan, who sells The Big Issue outside Trinity College, and is himself a poet. "I've been coming here for about 20 years," he said. "Paddy writes in three languages," the poet Pat Boran confided, "English, Irish - and Latin."
The poet John Montague stood at the back of the crowd, with his partner Elizabeth Wassell. "Kavanagh's physical presence was extraordinary," Montague reminisced. "There seemed to be an awful lot of him - huge hands, huge presence. And a huge sense of humour."
At three o'clock, the poet Macdara Woods opened proceedings. He began by remembering one of their original number, Michael Hartnett, who died last year, and who attended the ceremony every year, including last year, when he arrived in a new tweed suit.
Woods said Kavanagh's famous long poem, The Great Hun- ger, will shortly be translated into Greek. "And why shouldn't it be," Woods declared, "when he found his own Parnassian islands at this very place," and he quoted from one of Kavanagh's canalbank sonnets. No one will speak in prose/ Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
After the applause, the wind got up, rain threatened, and Grecian weather seemed far away. The crowd repaired to the Waterloo pub, where Kavanagh was once a customer.
