He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story A semi-autobiographical novel from the author of The Green Fool and The Great Hunger A man's mother can be a terrible burden sometimes. For Tarry Flynn - poet, farmer and lover-from-afar of beautiful young virgins - the responsibility of family, farm, poetic inspiration and his own unyielding lust is a heavy one. The only solution is to rise above all - or escape over the nearest horizon. Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn is an idyllic and beautifully evocative account of life as it was lived in Ireland in the 1930s.