Abstract

It is not unusual for a poet to turn to fiction at some point in his career, as if finding in the scope afforded by narrative an opportunity to extend and contextualise the more atemporal focus of the poetry. Typically, he will produce one or two novels characterized by easy elegance of language rather than by formal inventiveness: Clarke's Hiberno-Christian romances, Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn, George Barker's The Dead Seagull, Larkin's A Girl in Winter and Jill. These fictions are inevitably overshadowed by their writers' poetic achievements to the extent that it is nearly impossible to read the prose without referring it at some point to our knowledge of the poems.