I think no one was more aware that he was 'damaged goods' - than Kavanagh, himself.

He must have felt himself set apart from the people he was born amongst very early.

You know there are so many Irish singers going round selling the colour postcard Celtic idyllic Ireland - it really is the most fatal/profitable way for an Irish artist to go.

And you get none of that with Kavanagh. His work is full of the tales of the casual cruelties, the illogicalities, the unyielding nature of the soil itself.

And really nowadays, when the world's greatest poet is Seamus Heaney - you have to ask yourself - whose voice does Heaney remind you of? Surely not Yeats with all his abstractions and clever bits of esoteric knowledge. Kavanagh must surely have been an influence.

Kavanagh must have suffered agonies being so much a fish out of water in Dublin. But in truth he was a fish out of water everywhere. And that must be a hell of a situation to live in, when you socially at ease nowhere, unless you're too drunk not to care.