‘Bitter, gentle, funny’: Irish stars unite to celebrate overlooked poet Patrick Kavanagh

Celebrities including Bono and Liam Neeson hope to bring their homeland's bard to a global audience with an album of read poems

Patrick Kavanagh is one of Ireland's most revered poets - a genius from a rural backwater who made the parochial universal. Yet his fame never really reached other shores.

While William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney won Nobel prizes and were quoted by US presidents, acclaim for Kavanagh remained largely confined to his homeland.