Patrick Kavanagh's lost works published

Two works by celebrated Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh will be published for the first time today.

The previously undiscovered poems were found in Dublin and America by Dr Frank Shovlin, of the Irish Institute at the University of Liverpool.

Written 15 years apart, they were appearing simultaneously in the Galway-based quarterly journal west47 and the Times Literary Supplement.

Dr Shovlin said today: "The poems were found as the result of research I was doing for a doctorate at the University of Oxford on the history of Irish literary magazines.

"Kavanagh had contributed to a number of them throughout his career. I found the first work somewhat by accident among his papers at the Southern Illinois university. He had written it for a 1950 issue of a magazine, but it did not go ahead.

"The other, I estimate to have been written in 1936, was found in another magazine archive and is in Trinity College Dublin."

Kavanagh died in 1967, aged 63, and today’s publication of his unknown works were being regarded as a significant addition to Irish poetry, Dr Shovlin added.