A symphony of JCB engines and jack-hammers
“Leafy-with-love banks” begins one of Patrick Kavanagh’s celebrated pair of poems about the Grand Canal in Dublin, where he used to sit and meditate during the spiritual rebirth that accompanied his recovery from cancer in the 1950s.
“O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web of fabulous grass,” Kavanagh wrote in the same sonnet. Now, because of proximity to grass, his seated likeness is instead encaptured in a web of barricades. Happily, you can still sit down beside him . But the original Kavanagh seat on the opposite bank is completely incarcerated.
Speaking of the tremendous silence of mid-July, by the way, there wasn’t much of that either when I passed. A young American, meanwhile, had found out the man’s first name and, squatting beside him, addressed him by it continually while trying to keep him conscious.
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