When brightness leaves the trees they seem to fall
    Backwards, deprived of shadows, then rise again in a cool
    Diminishment of waiting, solider still.
                              Which it is possible
    Is what they mean whom death makes audible
    Beyond our ears and, I feel, as simple.

'Sun Overcast'

P.J.Kavanagh's poems are filled with praise, with the minute observations that transform a mood, or the dazzling recollection that can change the heart. 'If description is revelation,' wrote Derek Mahon in the Irish Times, 'his revelatory gift is prodigious. Now is the time to read P.J.Kavanagh.'

The religious sympathies of Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, the earth-love of Edward Thomas, the urbane wit of Louis MacNeice, are three of the many currents that run through his verse, giving it 'that quality of sheer readability' Vernon Scannell noted in the Sunday Telegraph. John Bayley declared, 'there are poets in any age who can give the impression of talk. Kavanagh is a real craftsman at this difficult form.'
    
The contents of seven collections are included in this comprehensive volume, which traces the poet through three and a half decades and ends with his remarkable human elegy and celebration of a beloved landscape, 'Severn Aisling', described by Frank Kermode as 'quite magnificent'.