In the original dust jacket. Red cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

Published in 1970 by Chatto and Windus & Hogarth Press (a Frost family company) 1st review Copy.

POETRY: Family evocations 

Please view the photographs 

Hardcover. First edition. ‘About Time’ is a single poem in ten sections of various styles and metres. It begins with an apologia to the poet’s father, ends with an imaginary conversation with his son, and in between is a record of one man’s responses to our time. The poem is bound tightly together by a number of themes, each of which acts upon the others, and the values which emerge almost silently are, because of this organisation, those of permanence and continuity.

P. J. Kavanagh FRSL (6 January 1931 – 26 August 2015) was an English poet, lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter Ted Kavanagh.Patrick Joseph Gregory Kavanagh worked as a Butlin’s Redcoat, then as a newsreader for Radiodiffusion Française, in Paris. He attended acting classes but was called up for National Service, and was wounded in the Korean War. Kavanagh attended Merton College, Oxford, from 1951 to 1954; there he began to write poetry, and met Caroline Sarah Jane Philipps, also known as Sally, the daughter of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. Kavanagh due to his traumatic experience in Korea had a hard time taking the educational institution seriously, however, managed to pass the degree with second-class honours. He and Philipps wed in 1956 in the London Oratory; two years later she died suddenly, of poliomyelitis, while they were living in Java, where he was teaching for the British Council. His memoir about their relationship, The Perfect Stranger, won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize after a long publishing battle, where Kavanagh’s work got turned down by several publishers. He published several volumes of poetry: One and One (1959), On the Way to the Depot (1967), About Time (1970), Edward Thomas in Heaven (1974), Life Before Death (1979) and An Enchantment (1991) and Something About (2004). There were collections: Selected Poems, Presences: New and Selected Poems, and Collected Poems. In 1993 he was given the Cholmondeley Award for poetry. Kavanagh’s first novel, A Song and a Dance, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize; he wrote three further novels: A Happy Man, People and Weather, and Only by Mistake; and two novels for children: Scarf Jack and Rebel for Good. He published a collection of essays and articles People and Places: A Selection 1975–1987, a travel autobiography Finding Connections, and a literary companion Voices in Ireland. He was a columnist for The Spectator from 1983 to 1996 and then for The Times Literary Supplement until 2002. Most of his journalistic work was based on book and poetry reviews as well as his personal reflections and experience. He was editor of Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney, The Bodley Head G. K. Chesterton, The Essential G. K. Chesterton, The Oxford Book of Short Poems (with James Michie) and A Book of Consolations. He co-presented the programmes Poetry Please on BBC Radio 4 and Not So Much a Programme on BBC1 TV alongside David Frost and Willie Rushton.