SOURCE: “Appréciation: Patrick Kavanagh's Landscape,” in Eire-Ireland, Vol. 21, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 105–18.

In the esay below, Duffy describes the Monaghan County countryside and its inhabitants and examines how Kavanagh communicated his perceptions of them in his art.

As a geographer, I'm interested in place and places—not always exotic places like southeast Asia or Latin America, but often ordinary little places that are important to the ordinary people who live in them. Such places are important because of the experiences of the people living in them—the communal experience of living and loving and being born and fighting with each other and working and dying over generations in the same place. Most of us are nostalgic in a time and a place sense: As we move through life, and often through places—we always hark back to our past and invariably to our first place—our home country...