Patrick Kavanagh Great hunger

'I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided .

' By turns comical, grouchy and exalted, and including his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger', some of the key poems by the writer who transformed Anglo-Irish verse.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour.

Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.