The Kick Book

"In The Kick, the Irish poet Richard Murphy, drawing on five decades of private notebooks, has created a memoir of his life and times. Written with the personality of a diary and full of self-disparaging wit, his memoir takes us from a decayed Protestant 'Big House' in the west of Ireland to the colonial island of Ceylon, where, in the 1930s, the author's father was the last British Mayor of Colombo." Murphy writes about delicate personal issues, including his own ambivalent sexuality, as he chronicles the making and unmasking of a writer. He includes amusing and moving accounts of his meetings and friendships with many prominent writers and actors from the literary milieux of London, Dublin and New York, including Harold Nicolson, J. R. Ackerley, Patrick Kavanaugh, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O'Brien, James Dickey, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Shaw, Mary Ure, Peter O'Toole, John McGahern, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.