In The Kick, poet Richard Murphy has constructed, from astonishingly detailed diaries kept over the course of five decades, a unique memoir of his life and times. The book is a publishing event. Murphy writes about the most painfully delicate personal issues, including his own ambivalent sexuality, and he also has brilliant accounts of meetings and friendships with some of the most significant post-war writers - WH Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, JR Ackerley, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, John McGahern and Conor Cruise O'Brien among them. He writes well about landscape and buildings, about his obsession with the coastline of the West of Ireland, and with affectionate lack of sentiment about the Protestant gentry from which he comes. The literary milleu in London, Dublin and New York are described with serenely devastating honesty. Here too are disturbing memories of discrimination against Irish Travellers, and of extreme violence in Sri Lanka. The Kick is the record of a lifetime's engagement with the fracturing tensions of personal life and with the more obviously violent legacies of Anglo-Irish history. It demonstrates the qualities that Ted Hughes recognised in Murphy's verse: 'It combines a high music with simplicity, force and directness in dealing with the world of action.'