Show poet’s positive side

Sir — It was very sad to read the uprooted 70-year-old news about Patrick Kavanagh threatening some bookshop owners in Dublin that, if his book The Green Fool was not in a prominent position in the bookshop window, there would be reprisals from him.

This may or may not be true, but do we really need to know after all this time? Kavanagh may well have been cantankerous, but it never shone through in his work. All the young students studying Kavanagh’s poetry, for their Junior and Leaving Certs, do not need to know the negative side of his life.

Granted, some of the lines in his long poem The Great Hunger were a bit explicit, but they needed to be to show the desperations and frustrations of the main character. I am sure when he wrote ‘remember me in 100 years from now and what I was like to know’ he was not thinking of silly quarrels with bookshop owners.

I, for one, would like to remember him as he was, when he first saw her and knew that her dark hair would weave a snare, as he sauntered down Raglan Road on an autumn day, so long, long ago. James J Heslin,

Keenagh, Co Longford