In his foreword to this book, Derek Mahon notes that P.J. Kavanagh's poems elude the obvious categories. He has never been one of a “school”. A poet of rural England, yet of Irish ancestry, Kavanagh has always stood slightly apart. He championed the poems of Ivor Gurney and shares with Gurney not only a personal landscape (that of Gloucestershire) but a poetic commitment to the actual and specific, to nature writing at its most rootedly precise. His is, in Mahon's words, a unique personal record: a lifetime's dedication has produced its rich results.
