This week Niall chooses five pieces played by the violinist Nicola Benedetti.
11:00 am – TAKING FLIGHT
Taking Flight is a series of radio essays celebrating the work and continued influence of the poet Patrick Kavanagh. It was commissioned by The Patrick Kavanagh Centre with the support of Monaghan County Council and Creative Ireland.
Participants in this series include writers, a filmmaker and poet. These creative responses to Kavanagh’s work illustrate the significance of the poet in our culture and the potency of his own work as a source of continued artistic exploration.
Kavanagh once remarked that his more successful works achieved ‘weightlessness’, ‘that I had become airborne and more’. This series celebrates Kavanagh’s brilliance and his encouragement to successive generations of artists and thinkers to achieve weightlessness and take flight.
Episode 1 ‘Love Letter to The Hospital’ By Annemarie Ní Churreáin
How can a poem transform darkness into light? How can it hold together the ghosts of trauma and survival? In A Love Letter To The Hospital, Donegal poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin visits St James’ Hospital in Dublin 08 to reconnect with the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh who underwent surgery in 1955 for the removal of a lung. In this essay, Ní Churreáin reflects upon Kavanagh’s influence upon her own poetic explorations of landscape, history and the mysteries at the heart of human suffering.
Narrated & Written by Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Producers: Eithne Hand and The Patrick Kavanagh Centre
Sound Editing: Eithne Hand
Producer for RTÉ lyric fm: Eoin O Kelly
Patrick Kavanagh’s original works reproduced with kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency
This project is funded by Monaghan County Council & Creative Ireland. The broadcast partner is RTÉ lyric fm
RTÉ lyric fm, Friday 8th October, 10am-1pm