In The Kick, Irish poet Richard Murphy constructs—from astonishingly detailed diaries kept over five decades—a memoir of his personal life and the violent legacies of Anglo-Irish history. In unsparing prose, he writes about painfully delicate personal issues, including his sexuality, as well as the Protestant gentry from which he comes. With serene, devastating honesty, he describes the literary milieus of London, Dublin, and New York and his friendships and encounters with some of the leading postwar writers, including W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, J.R. Ackerley, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, John McGahern, and Conor Cruise O’Brien. These are the personal, literary, and political engagements of a lifetime, as recounted by a poet with the “gift of epic objectivity.”