A pensive Hartnett ‘among (his) nameless weeds’. Photographer unknown.
As I have mentioned already in another post here, the decade from 1975 to 1985 in Glendarragh, Templeglantine, was arguably the most productive of Hartnett’s career. Indeed, the output from that little cottage in the shade of ‘Tom White’s green hill’ in Glendarragh was prodigious. The first poems to be published were his collection A Farewell to English, which was published in 1975, and thus began his long-lasting association with Peter Fallon and The Gallery Press. The same year saw the publication of The Retreat of Ita Cagney / Cúlú Íde. Adharca Broic was published in 1978, followed by An Phurgóid in 1983, Do Nuala: Foighne Crainn in 1984 and his fourth collection in Irish, An Lia Nocht, appeared in 1985. During this period, he also undertook the translation of Daibhí Ó Brudair’s poems, which were published in 1985. Many of his better Glendarragh poems are contained in the 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens. This collection, following his return to Dublin, contains all poems in Irish with their English translation that Hartnett wanted preserved for posterity, and it was edited by Peter Fallon.
During this decade, 1975 to 1985, in parallel to this ‘serious’ output, he was writing and entertaining the locals with ballads, some serious or semi-serious like ‘A Ballad on the State of the Nation’, which was distributed as a one-page pamphlet like the ballads of old and even included original linocuttings by local artist Cliodhna Cussen. Other ballads were more contentious and even semi-libellous (or fully slanderous!), such as ‘The Balad (sic) of Salad Sunday’ and ‘The Duck Lovers Dance’. These latter creations were written under the very appropriate nom de plume, ‘The Wasp’! His most memorable local work was, of course, ‘Maiden Street Ballad’, a poem he composed for his father as a Christmas present in 1980.
These three intimate family poems were written in Glendarragh, Templeglantine and first appeared in his collection, Adharca Broic, in 1978. Two of the poems are written for his children: Lara, who was born in 1968 and Niall, who was born in 1971. These two poems with English translations also appear in his 1987 collection A Necklace of Wrens. The third poem, Dán do Rosemary, was not included in this collection, and the reason for its exclusion is obvious. As early as 1978, the tensions and stresses which eventually led to their separation in 1985 were beginning to show. They were both navigating the inevitable separation, which eventually led to his departure for Dublin and Inchicore that year. His gift for love poetry is again in evidence, as it had been back in 1968 with the publication of Anatomy of a Cliché. Unfortunately, the clock had come full circle, and his final poem to Rosemary is one of abject apology and regret and wistful hopes for their post-separation lives.
The poem reads as a sad indictment of the way artists were treated in this country in the 70s and 80s. They lead a ‘miserable life’, ‘for our lack of money / scrimping and scraping’. He apologises profusely and admits that their marriage is ‘pitiless, loveless’, which has affected ‘your soft fragile (English) heart’. Their small rural cottage is ‘run-down’, with ‘walls of clay, tear-stained’, ‘the place is falling apart’. He takes full responsibility for their sorry plight and admits that he is ‘blundering, tactless, clueless’. I have said elsewhere that at this time, Newcastle West was booming during the construction phase of the Aughenish Alumina Plant near Askeaton in County Limerick. Newcastle’s twenty-six pubs were doing a roaring trade, and he apologises to his wife because he is ‘always acting the yob in the pub’. If anything, this poem in the original Irish is far more confessional and personal than most of his poetry up to this time.
The poem concludes on a far more positive and hopeful note. He tells Rosemary that he has ‘abandoned English, but I never turned my back on you’. This is a time for reappraisal, and he hopes to ‘relearn my craft from fresh woodland’ – he was living at the time in a townland called Glendarragh – the glen of the oak. He ends on a hopeful note: he hopes that the future will bring Rosemary happiness and that her ‘worth will be appreciated’. The final line is so sad and poignant – he hopes that ‘we both reach our America’. The sadness of this final line arises from the fact that some seven years later, they both parted and went their separate ways.
Cliodhna Cussen, a fellow native of Newcastle West, has an interesting point to make about this poem:
‘Nuair a dhirigh Michéal ar an nGaeilge níor cuireadh aon rófháilte roimhe. Bhí ceisteanna á n-ardú i dtaobh chaighdeán a chuid Gaeilge, ceisteanna a árdaíodh i dtaobh an Riordánaigh 30 bliain níos túisce. Ach léiríonn Michéal a anam, a chuspóir, agus a ghrá sa tseoid sin de dhán, ‘Dán do Rosemary’, ina bhfuil a chumas agus a chroí nochtaithe aige’.
When Michael began writing in Irish, he didn’t receive great encouragement from Gaelgóirí. There were questions about the standard of his Irish, just as there had been about Sean Ó Riordán some thirty years earlier. But in this gem of a poem, ‘Poem for Rosemary’, Hartnett reveals his soul, his motive, his love – indeed, his supreme craft and heart are laid bare.’ (My own translation).
His poem for his son Niall, Dán do Niall, 7 (‘Poem for Niall, 7’), again shows his honesty and courage, although it does tend to descend into cliché at times. Like King Canute and his futile attempts to hold back the tide, he wishes that his son wouldn’t have to leave this safe place in ‘Bird Nest country’, their home in Glendarragh. He tries to warn his son about the many dangers that exist in the outside world and does so by making reference to nature. This advice is somewhat reminiscent of the advice spoken by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man’. This suggests that integrity begins with honesty to oneself, and Hartnett gives us a modern take on this when he advises, ‘Be happy but be tough. ’
There is great poignancy in the final stanza when he states that he will be there for his son ‘in spite of death’. Niall was 28 when his father died in 1999 at the age of 58, and the second line of this stanza adorns the poet’s headstone in Calvary Cemetery in Newcastle West: ‘mar labhraíonn dúch is labhraíonn pár’, ‘for ink speaks and paper speaks’. The poet is saying that he will be present and live on in his body of work even after his death. The reality is that he wasn’t there for many of the landmark celebrations in his son’s life, his graduations, his wedding, the birth of his grandchildren and so the promise he makes, ‘and some day I’ll buy you porter!’ sounds very hollow indeed to a young man who must now take on the onerous mantle of preserving and promoting his father’s rich and varied legacy at such a young age.
Hartnett’s grave in Calvary Cemetery, Churchtown, Newcastle West. The inscription reads: ‘Beadsa ann d’anneoin an bháis, mar labhraíonn dúch is labhraíonn pár’, (‘I will be there in spite of death, for ink speaks and paper speaks.’
His Dán do Lara, 10, (‘Poem for Lara, 10’), is a masterpiece. The sunshine and nature in this poem are at odds with the penury and hardship of the poet’s existence in 1978, nestling below ‘Tom White’s green hill’ in Glendarragh, Templeglantine. Flame-haired Lara is compared to a rowan tree in autumn, her voice disturbing the larks, ‘in the green grass’. She is surrounded by nature in all its glory, ‘a crowd of daisies playing with you, a crowd of rabbits dancing with you’. The blackbird and the goldfinch are there for her amusement and playtime. Then the master of metaphor compares his daughter: ‘You are perfume, you are honey, a wild strawberry.’ The poem ends with the poet’s wish for his young daughter:
Little queen of the land of books
may you be always thus
may you ever be free
from sorrow-chains.
Interestingly, the poet compares his daughter to a queen in ‘the land of books’; this seems to set the seal on Lara’s perfection. Obviously, a poet would value literature and reading, and his choice of this image is significant as it tells us that Lara has another, deeper side to her – she is not just interested in the outdoors and a lover of nature.
His final wish for Lara is that she will grow up to be as beautiful and graceful as her mother, Rosemary. He hopes that she will inherit her mother’s beautiful soul as well as ‘the beauty of her face.’
It is fitting that these three poems, written in that little rural cottage in Glendarragh, feature family and the travails of being a husband and a parent. I have examined many of his papers in the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street, and it is undeniable that hand-in-hand with arranging his poems and latest projects, there is ample evidence of the presence of young people, Lara and Niall, in the many doodles and scribbles on the margins of those frayed notebooks.
A detail from the beautiful sculpture in the Square, Newcastle West, by the sculptor, Rory Breslin, showing Hartnett clasping a copy of the 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens.
Note: This poem, along with Dán do Niall, 7, and Dán do Rosemary, Lara’s mother, first appeared in Michael Hartnett’s first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, in 1978. The poem, along with Dán do Niall, 7, later appeared in A Necklace of Wrens in 1987, with both poems given an English translation by the poet himself. Both collections, Adharca Broic and A Necklace of Wrens (edited by Peter Fallon), were published by The Gallery Press.
Note: This poem to his son, Niall, first appeared in Michael Hartnett’s first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, which was published in 1978 by Peter Fallon’s Gallery Press. It was published again in the 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens, this time with an English translation.
Note: This poem is taken from Michael Hartnett’s first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, which was published in 1978 by Peter Fallon’s Gallery Press.
An unknown Spailpín Fánach circa 1858. A colourised image by Matt Loughrey from a black and white photograph originally collected by Sean Sexton.
The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin
The cow of morning spurted Do thál bó na maidine
milk-mist on each glen ceo bainne ar gach gleann
and the noise of feet came is tháinig glór cos anall
from the hills’ white sides ó shleasa bána na mbeann.
I saw like phantoms Chonaic mé, mar scáileanna,
my fellow-workers mo spailpíní fánacha,
and instead of spades and shovels is in ionad sleán nó rámhainn acu
they had roses on their shoulders. bhí rós ar ghualainn chách.
Translated by Michael Hartnett from his original Irish poem.
Commentary
This gem of a poem was first published as part of Hartnett’s first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, in 1978. The poem also appears in Hartnett’s 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens, with an English translation by the poet himself. Of the twenty-three poems in A Necklace of Wrens, thirteen are included from that first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, with English translations by the poet. Peter Fallon, his publisher and editor, has stated that the poems included in A Necklace of Wrens were the only Irish poems that Hartnett wanted to be preserved after his ten-year sojourn in West Limerick. This collection was followed a year later by Poems to Younger Women, entirely in English. Theo Dorgan tells us that both these collections show ‘a startling return to the power and complexity we might have expected had the poet not turned aside from English in 1975’.
‘The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’ offers a modern perspective on the traditional Aisling (vision) poem genre. The poem blends traditional imagery with contemporary twentieth-century realism, transforming the spectral ‘fellow-workers’, the ‘spailpíní fánacha’ of the original, into figures with ‘roses on their shoulders’ instead of spades, suggesting a hopeful, transformed vision of labour and society, rather than the lament for lost Gaelic order typical of historical Aisling poems.
Here, the focus shifts from the old political lament of older Aisling poems to a more modern, grounded, hopeful vision, using the image of the rose, the international symbol of the Labour Movement, of which Hartnett was a card-carrying member. While the original poems lamented historical events like the Flight of the Earls and the hoped-for return of Bonny Prince Charlie and the Stuarts to power, Hartnett’s poem shifts the focus to a contemporary sense of disillusionment and emotional turmoil. Hartnett does use the image of a new day dawning to reinforce the hopeful possibility of better days ahead, however, while Hartnett’s translation adapts the ancient Aisling form in a contemporary context, in my view, this Aisling is heavily laden with irony, if not cynicism, because of Labour’s perceived inability to improve the lot of the working class and its failure to gain long-term popular mainstream support, particularly in the post-World War II era.
The title and the poem itself reference the Aisling genre, a poetic form that developed in Gaelic poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries. Readers familiar with Irish poetry will also be aware that in these old Aisling poems, Ireland was often depicted as a woman: sometimes young and beautiful, sometimes old and haggard. In the final poem in his first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, Hartnett reprints his iconic poem, Cúlú Íde, in which he portrays Íde (Ita Cagney in the English version) as a strong, formidable woman, and he endows her with many of the traditional characteristics of the spéirbhéan (the spirit woman) from the original Aisling poems. She is depicted as a modern Bean Dubh an Ghleanna, Gráinne Mhaol, Roisín Dubh or Caithleen Ní Houlihan – in effect, a symbolic representation of the new Ireland.
This modern Aisling, ‘The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’ also features striking imagery, such as the ‘cow of morning’ that ‘spurted milk-mist on each glen’. The image of the cow, the Droimeann Donn Dílis, was also a stock reference to represent Ireland in Jacobite poetry and the hoped-for return of the Stuart dynasty, which, many at the time believed, would benefit Ireland. This initial image creates a surreal and elemental atmosphere, setting a new tone for the vision. The crucial shift occurs when these workers have ‘roses on their shoulders’ instead of ‘spades and shovels,’ symbolising a transformed, idealised vision of labour, where it is no longer depicted as hardship or indentured slavery but as something beautiful and dignified.
The rose, particularly the red rose, later became a symbol for the Labour Movement through the slogan ‘bread and roses,’ which represents the dual desire for both the means to live (bread) and a life of dignity and fulfilment (roses). This symbol is associated with the fight for social and economic justice and is used by many social democratic and labour parties, such as the Labour Party in Ireland and the UK.
The ‘phantoms’ seen by the speaker are described as ‘fellow-workers’, ‘comrades’ even, transforming traditional imagery of spectral figures into more tangible, relatable characters associated with Labour. The older, traditional variety are the sad spectral figures that accost Hartnett one summer’s evening as he heads from his home in Newcastle West to meet his uncle Dinny Halpin in Camas. The episode is recounted for us in the second section of his iconic poem, ‘A Farewell to English’,
These old men walked on the summer road
sugán belts and long black coats
with big ashplants and half-sacks
of rags and bacon on their backs.
These spectral figures were a pathetic vision, ‘hungry, snotnosed, half-drunk’. These ragged poets, Andrias Mac Craith, also known as An Mangaire Súgach, The Merry Peddlar, (along with his contemporary, Sean Ó Tuama an Ghrinn, who also hailed from Croom, the seat of one of the last ‘courts’ of Gaelic poetry), Aodhagán Ó Rathaille from Meentogues near Rathmore in the Sliabh Luachra area (also the birthplace of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin), and Dáithí Ó Bruadair, who was on his way from Springfield Castle, the seat of the Fitzgeralds, to Cahirmoyle, the seat of his other great patron, John Bourke), represented the sad remnants of a glorious past.
The ‘phantom’ figures leave Hartnett resting ‘on a gentle bench of grass’, leaving him to ponder his own future as their direct descendant:
They looked back once,
black moons of misery
sickling their eye-sockets,
a thousand years of history
in their pockets.
Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, the putative author of this Aisling and a real-life spailpín in his own right, lived a life which was the stuff of legend and lore, and, indeed, it has many similarities with Hartnett’s own rakish life. Many of the stories surrounding him may very well be apocryphal, to say the least. However, he and his fellow parishioner, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, are most famous for their mastery of the Aisling genre.
Eoghan Rua was born in 1748 in Meentogues, in the mountainous Sliabh Luachra area, in southwestern Ireland. By the time of his birth, most of the native Irish in the southwest had been reduced to landless poverty. However, the area boasted of having one of the last ‘classical schools’ of Irish poetry, descended from the ancient, rigorous schools that had trained bards and poets for generations. In these last few remnants of the bardic schools, Irish poets competed for attention and rewards, and learned music, English, Latin and Greek.
Eoghan Rua (the Rua refers to his red hair) was witty and charming but had the misfortune to live at a time when an Irish Catholic had no professional future in his own country because of the anti-CatholicPenal Laws. He also had a reckless character and threw away the few opportunities he was given. For example, at the age of eighteen, he opened his own school; however, we are told that ‘an incident occurred, nothing to his credit, which led to the break-up of his establishment.’
Eoghan Rua then became a spailpín, an itinerant farm worker, until he was 31 years old. He was then conscripted into the British Navy under interesting circumstances. Ó Súilleabháin was then working for the Nagles, a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. They were Catholic and Irish-speaking, and had their seat in Kilavullen along the Blackwater valley near Fermoy, County Cork. (The Nagles were themselves an unusual family. The mother of the Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke was one of the Nagles, as was Nano Nagle, the founder of the charitable Presentation order of nuns. She was declared venerable in the Catholic Church on 31 October 2013 by Pope Francis).
Daniel Corkery relates that, ‘I have had it told to myself that one day in their farmyard Eoghan Rua heard a woman, another farm-hand, complain that she had need to write a letter to the master of the house, and had failed to find anyone able to do so. ‘I can do that for you’, Eoghan said, and though doubtful, she consented that he should. Pen and paper were brought to him, and he sat down and wrote the letter in four languages: in Greek, in Latin, in English, and in Irish. ‘Who wrote this letter?’ the master asked the woman in astonishment. The red-headed young labourer was brought before him, questioned, and thereupon set to teach the children of the house. However, again owing to Eoghan Rua’s bad behaviour, he had to flee the house, the master pursuing him with a gun’. Legend says he was forced to flee when he got a woman pregnant: some say that it was Mrs Nagle herself!
Ó Súilleabháin escaped to the British Army barracks in Fermoy, and he soon found himself aboard a Royal Navy ship in the West Indies, ‘one of those thousands of barbarously mistreated seamen’. He sailed under Admiral Sir George Rodney and took part in the famous 1782 sea Battle of the Saintes against French Admiral Comte de Grasse. The British won, and to ingratiate himself with the Admiral, Ó Súilleabháin wrote an English-language poem, Rodney’s Glory, lauding the Admiral’s prowess in battle and presented it to him. Ó Súilleabháin asked to be set free from service, but this request was denied him.
Much of Eoghan Rua’s life is unknown and clouded in mystery and intrigue. He returned after his wartime exploits to his native Sliabh Luachra and opened a school again. Soon afterwards, at 35, he died from a fever that set in after he was struck by a pair of fire tongs in an alehouse quarrel by the servant of a local Anglo-Irish family. ‘The story of how, after the fracas in Knocknagree in which he was killed, a young woman lay down with him and tempted him to make sure he was really dead, was passed on with relish’.
There is some confusion as to where he is buried. Some claim he was buried in midsummer 1784, in Nohoval Daly graveyard (or Nohoval Lower Graveyard), which is located on the Cork side of the River Blackwater on the R582 Knocknagree to Rathmore road. Others claim that he was buried in the cemetery of Muckross Abbey, Killarney, along with two other great Kerry poets, Séafradh Ua Donnchadha, who died in 1677, and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, who died in 1728. There is a plaque on the wall of Muckross Abbey today that commemorates this event. The plaque also pays tribute to another great Kerry poet, Piaras Feiritéar, who was hanged ‘thall i gCill Áirne’, ‘over in Killarney’, in 1653. The plaque also has an inscription which is attributed to an tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín, the great lexicographer, most famous for compiling the Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla (Irish-English Dictionary), first published in 1904. He, too, was from Meentogues, the birthplace of both Ó Suilleabhán and Ó Rathaille.
The plaque on the wall of Muckross Abbey in Killarney claims that Eoghan Rua is buried in the Abbey cemetery, along with Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Séafradh Ua Donnchadha.
It was said of Eoghan Rua that,
Perhaps there never was a poet so entirely popular– never one of whom it could be more justly said volitar vivus per ora virum [He soars, alive in the mouths of the people]. His songs were sung everywhere…. Munster was spellbound for generations…. The present generation, to whom the Irish language is not vernacular, in reading these poems should bear in mind that they were all intended to be sung, and to airs then perfectly understood by the people, and that no adequate idea can be informed of their power over the Irish mind, unless they are heard sung by an Irish-speaking singer to whom they are familiar.
There is much to admire in this short poem. Indeed, I feel I am but scratching the surface. However, short and concise as it is, I feel it has relevance to a modern audience eager to bridge the gap to a harrowing era in Irish literary history. Indeed, the poem’s tone is one of elegy, lament, and perhaps a quiet resignation to loss, reflecting the disorienting experience of a changing world.
In his wide-ranging essay, which gives an overview of Hartnett’s work, ‘A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett’, Theo Dorgan points out that although he never translated the totem figures, Mac Craith and Ó Tuama,
‘he could and did think of himself as the favoured inheritor of a tradition, and also as one obliged to be loyal to that tradition. This sense of obligation would become the sign and signature of his work’.
That life’s work in both languages serves as a bridge between Ireland’s rich poetic past and its modern present. His poetry and translations from the Irish have given him firsthand knowledge of traditional Irish forms, such as the Aisling, and he uses these in very innovative ways in his contemporary poetry. By taking a traditional form such as the Aisling and imbuing it with modern themes, Hartnett allows a new generation to connect with a classical poetic tradition while grappling with the emotional and political undercurrents of their own time.
The startling achievement of this short eight-line poem is that Hartnett manages to crystallise all the tropes and traditions of the Aisling genre while at the same time staying relevant to a modern audience. This Aisling alone proves that he is a worthy successor to the ‘phantoms’, those spectral figures who confronted him at Doody’s Cross, ‘a thousand years of history in their pockets’.
References
Dorgan, Theo. ‘A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett’, from The Poets and Poetry of Munster: One Hundred Years of Poetry from South Western Ireland, ed. Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Stephanie Schwerter (December 2022/January 2023).
All poets are singular, in the sense that we are all singular, each of us bearing the burden of one life and one life only, but also in the sense that no poet can be comfortably placed in a definite lineage, presented to us as a manifestation in one particular line of tradition. Michael Hartnett was more singular than most. He was of Munster, and he acknowledged Munster forebears, but if this was the place he started from, he was unpredictable and cosmopolitan in his tastes and in the company he would keep; nothing in his background could have predicted or predetermined the poetry he would make, the arc his life would take.
Birth and a people
He was born in 1941, in Croom, County Limerick; he grew up in Newcastle West, in a time of close horizons, small expectations and apparently narrow minds. In those days, for the children of the poor, the prospects were few; the best hope was emigration, offering what the country could not – work and a living, however diminished. For the waywardly gifted, however, there is always the opportunity to carve out one’s own niche, albeit at the sacrifice of comfort and social place as generally understood. The State was barely thirty years old and had already abandoned the revolutionary promise to cherish its children equally when Michael Hartnett stepped outside the boundaries of class and predestiny to discover himself a poet.
He published his first work in a local paper at the age of thirteen, his first poem in The Irish Times when he was still a schoolboy. From the day he left school, he thought of himself first and always as a poet.
A poet of and from a particular place
In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Hartnett says: ‘I’m the only ‘recognised’ living Irish poet who was born in Croom, County Limerick, which was the seat of one of the last courts of poetry in Munster: Seán Ó Tuama and Aindrias Mac Craith. When I was quite young, I became very conscious of these poets, and, so, read them very closely indeed.’[1]
In small places, folk memory runs deep, and a certain cachet endured in the title ‘poet’, with connotations of ‘other’, ‘different’, ‘gifted’, and ‘dangerous’. With the niche already prepared, so to speak, one sees the attraction for a curious young mind, already verbally adept and quick: poetry offered place, ancestry, a degree of acceptance for the chosen path and open horizons for a young man who had already discovered the power of words.
It is hardly uncommon, in a young poet, that she or he would first begin to grow in the shelter of some chosen poet mentor, whose sensibility, or technique, or more usually some amalgam of both, opened a road forward in the craft. When Hartnett first sought such a precursor, he looked at his immediate local context and backwards into another time and another language. What he found there would make no discernible impact on his craft (he never translated the totem figures, Mac Craith or Ó Tuama) but they furnished him with a particular kind of warrant – he could and did think of himself as the favoured inheritor of a tradition, and also as one obliged to be loyal to that tradition. This sense of obligation would become the sign and signature of his work.
Few Irish poets writing in English would own fealty to the tradition of Irish language poetry in the way that Hartnett did; his contemporaries and near-contemporaries chose figures who were perhaps as close to home but were certainly nearer in time, in language and in their themes and subjects. His Irish at the time was meagre, mostly acquired through overhearing Bridget Halpin, his grandmother, speak at late night firesides when the child had been safely put to bed. Much of his childhood was spent in her Camas cottage. He would later claim that she was one of the last native speakers of Irish in the district. While there are grounds for doubting this, his grandmother had a formative influence on the poet’s imagination – he would say that once she saw him with a necklace of wrens circling around his head, leading her to proclaim him a poet. He relished this atavistic sense of recognition, and would celebrate his grandmother in one of his most famous poems, ‘Death of an Irishwoman’[2]:
It is a far more cold-eyed tribute than the earlier, more conventional ‘For my Grandmother, Bridget Halpin’, a sign that Hartnett is willing to acknowledge ancestry but also to strike out in his own particular direction.
Elected Company
Poets will gather about themselves, by elective affinity, those ancestors and companions that they need, not those wished upon them. We are more likely to understand them when we allow them to fly free in their chosen company.
Hartnett’s chosen companions were both eclectic and wayward, the company he chose as he pursued his life in poetry but also formed a consistory to whom he felt himself bound in loyalty and comradeship. Thus, in ‘A Farewell to English’ (and the indefinite article here is significant), these lines:
The plangent concluding lines of Antoine Ó Raifteirí’s poem ‘Cill Aodáin’ are these: ‘S dá mbeinn-se i mo sheasamh i gceartlár mo dhaoine/ D’imeodh an aois díom is bheinn arís óg.” A working translation: “And were I standing right at the heart of my people/ Age would go from me and I would be young again.”
I invoke these lines because to understand Michael Hartnett, it is of the first importance to recognise that ‘mo dhaoine’, ‘my people’, gives us both provenance of the man, and hence of the work, and also the mandate that governed and guided his trajectory on this earth, from first to last.
Hartnett, throughout his life, referred back to his sense of a people, defined and redefined that community to encompass family, neighbours and friends, antecedent poets, and that tribe of audience and influence, an intelligible company chosen by elective affinity. He wrote always for his place and for his people, sometimes as if in a guided trance, but always aware of the bond as both necessary and inescapable. If he was sometimes at home in and sometimes estranged from both place and people, if this community was sometimes balm and sometimes bane, nevertheless, this was the territory in which he lived out his life and to which he felt honour bound.
The territory encompassed by his native Newcastle West and neighbouring Camas and Templeglantine, extending outwards to the province of Munster and on to Dublin, touching on Spain and the Classical world in its farthest rippling, while vertically, so to speak, reaching back for Ó Tuama, Ó Bruadair, Ó Rathaille, Sor Juana Iñes de la Cruz and Federico García Lorca.
He would show a lifelong fidelity to his birthplace, but he had no illusions about the soul-cramping truth of a small place where ambition was suffocated in the cradle. The early poem, ‘A Small Farm’, begins:
The early poems are mannered, veering close to the Symbolism of the Russian Silver Age, marking a territory of savagery, death, and disappointment in a stylised language that only rarely swerves into the high plain speech that would become his signature music.
We hear this true note first and best in Anatomy of a Cliché (1968).[6] There are birds here, but there is also ‘cold rain glisten/hung on each shocked feather’, the feel of the actual intensely experienced, even if birds are sometimes co-opted as metaphor, as in poem XI,
Hartnett had been five years in Dublin when this collection appeared, but as Michael Smith points out: ‘Michael arrived in Dublin as an already published poet who was not looking for, nor needing any, teachers in the art of poetry.’ [8]
Smith tells us that Hartnett enrolled as a student in UCD, thanks to patronage from James Liddy, but ‘Michael almost never attended a lecture’. He found the University congenial, not so much for its teaching, but because it placed him in a company of young poets, including Macdara Woods, Smith, Eamon Grennan, Brian Lynch and, importantly, Paul Durcan. Hartnett and Durcan shared a common belief in poetry as a high calling that demanded surrender, devotion, and a single-mindedness, elevating it above all other duties. It is no reflection on their contemporaries to say that Hartnett and Durcan considered it something of a sacred moral imperative to stand at a slant to the shared social world, to embrace a certain kind of high loneliness. In Hartnett’s case, this high loneliness would be tuned to a keener pitch when, in 1975, he made the momentous decision to switch from writing in English to writing in Irish.
Farewell to English
A Farewell to English,[9] published in that year, was a watershed book for Hartnett. Much of the attention this collection continues to draw is focused on the title poem, at the expense of the complex array of signalling in the poems that lead up to it. There is the acknowledgement of the toxic, particular nexus of alcohol and poverty in ‘The Buffeting’ and in ‘Early One Morning’, self-excoriating poems that are both clinical and merciless in their impact. There is the archetype of the fated and fatal victim in ‘The Oat Woman’, a figure to equal anything Graves, or Pasternak, can conjure, and there is its twin poem, ‘Death By The Santry River’ – both poems are stalked by terror. There is that ferocious political poem ‘USA’, and there are the poems that circle back to the home place – ‘Mrs. Halpin and the Lightning’, ‘Pig Killing’, ‘A Visit to Croom 1745’. Hartnett may be seen to be preparing his case for the title sequence, reaching back to his first circle of belonging, then nodding towards his second circle of elective affinities (in ‘Struts’, for example, with its ‘We are climbing upwards into time/and climbing backwards into tradition’), before he plunges forward into the Grand Declaration. Before we get there, we should take a long, cool look at ‘A Visit to Castletown House’.
The great Palladian mansion, Ireland’s first and still its finest, was built to consolidate and further the social and political designs of William Conolly, speaker of the Irish House of Commons. Begun in 1722, completed in 1727, it was both a residence and a symbol of Irish achievement and ambition. The political congresses envisioned by Conolly never took place there, but the house did come to represent a phase in the evolution of a new kind of politics in Ireland, and much of the thinking about quasi-independence from direct British rule was fostered there. Of course, Castletown House was also a centre of dominance as far as the poorer classes were concerned, a ‘Big House’ carrying all the complex baggage that term implies.
Set in lush countryside on the banks of the wide, slow-moving Liffey, Castletown stood as a monument to what might be called the aristocratic pastoral. Hartnett’s poem moves through that pastoral landscape to an acknowledgement of the building in the “mere secreting wood”, overthrown at the cost of knuckles that bled and bones that broke, to a sharper focus on the pretensions of the nouveaux riches and on to the precise bitterness of the closing five lines:
I stepped into the gentler evening air
and saw black figures dancing on the lawn,
Eviction, Droit de Seigneur, Broken Bones:
and heard the crack of ligaments being torn
and smelled the clinging blood upon the stones. [10]
The poem may be read as a prologue to the title sequence of the collection. The relentless drive to its pitiless conclusion, the brief rehearsals of what were already central themes in the poet’s work, are interrupted by stanza four, introducing a new theme that will manifest with increasing power in later poems such as ‘Sibelius in Silence’: Hartnett’s deep insight into music as a high art.
It would be simplistic to read Hartnett’s turning away into Irish as atavism, as an arbitrary and wilful gesture. He was already an assured presence as a poet in English, a distinctive, recognised and recognisable voice. If he had an inherited sense of the rightful grievances of the poor, the landless and powerless, and the political acumen to understand the power relations that had evolved through Ireland’s colonised history, he had also a cool and sophisticated grasp of high art, as evidenced in this fourth stanza:
Here, on the point of turning away from a language he had already mastered, Hartnett is sounding what will surface as a powerful strain in his later work: his deep understanding of and affinity with a broad European aesthetic. Sections (iii) and (iv) of ‘A Farewell to English’ are satires, in the Gaelic tradition of the ‘aor’, a form of invective that holds up its target to a savage form of ridicule. Dennis O’ Driscoll misses the point when he dismisses these sections as “philistine nonsense”; I think he misses the humour of these sections, the delicate and deliberate brio of exaggeration which Hartnett artfully deploys his point, as he says himself in the interview with O’ Driscoll, is that he was infuriated by the neglect of, and the lip service paid to, the Gaelic language and the Gaelic poetic tradition. In taking a deliberately hyperbolic swipe at the guardians of what had become State culture, he is making a subtler point: you cannot make all-encompassing claims for Irish identity and Irish poetry when what you mean is Irish poetry in English, an Irish identity that manifests only in English. The argument is made most pointedly in section vi), where the second stanza is brutally dismissive of “our Governments”, and follows hard on the heels of the last two lines in the first stanza: “For Gaelic is our final sign that/ we are human, therefore not a herd”. [12]
Sections iii), iv) and vi) are best thought of as a flourish of the matador’s cape, a heightening of the dramatic temperature to mask sober and serious business. Hartnett experienced poetry as a calling; he felt himself bound by an imperative from elsewhere that was a cloudy blend of local tradition in folklore and literature, a sense of his duty to speak for his class, his wide and miscellaneous reading and the imperatives he drew from that reading. He himself offered various reasons for turning away from English, which may be summarised as a reluctance to see the language go down into the dark. But consider, he had little Irish himself, there were already contemporaries such as Caitlín Maude, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt and others who were effectively driving a mini-renaissance in Irish language poetry – the survival of the language did not depend on Hartnett’s frail and hesitant voice, and he was intelligent enough to know this:
We should not forget that the long decay of the Irish language as a vernacular, and as a literary language, was neither an organic nor an unavoidable phenomenon. The former colonial power had an explicit and effective policy for the extirpation of the language, and this, coupled with the brute post-Famine necessity to privilege English to find a foothold in the English-speaking lands towards which forced emigration was inevitably directed, drove what we might call an evolutionary adaptation.
Hartnett, meagre though his store of Irish was, felt impelled to stand for the lost civilisation, the neglected and imperilled element that he thought crucial to Irish identity. How much of his argument was deeply felt, how much was post-hoc rationalisation, will be argued for a long time but need not detain us, since there was a deeper imperative at work. To put it as simply as possible, it is not so much that Hartnett chose Irish as that Irish chose him. The words came “like grey slabs of slate breaking from/an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin”.[14]
Out of nowhere, the words came to him, and he felt himself summoned:
It was the words themselves, as they drifted into his consciousness, that prompted this radical departure from ‘the gravel of Anglo-Saxon’. He does not suggest that he followed unquestioningly:
What was I doing with these foreign words?
I, the polisher of the complex clause,
wizard of grasses and warlock of birds
midnight-oiled in the metric laws?
Section ii) offers two further imperatives: he sets out to walk to Camas, “half-afraid to break a promise” made to his uncle Dinny Halpin, and on the way he encounters ghosts, “black moons of misery/ sickling their eye-sockets/ a thousand years of history / in their pockets.” These apparitions are walking to “Croom, Meentogues and Cahirmoyle”, which Hartnett glosses: “Croom: area in Co. Limerick associated with Aindrias Mac Craith (d.1795); also, seat of the last ‘courts’ of Gaelic poetry; also, my birthplace. Meentogues: birthplace of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille. Cahirmoyle: site of the house of John Bourke (fl. 1690), patron of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair.” Bracketed by these calls on his fealty, to place, to people and to poetry, he considered he had no choice but to turn to Irish. Many years later he would write: “…I have poems at hand:/ It’s words I cannot find…” [16]
For all the enmeshments of his situation in history, Hartnett turned to Irish primarily because he heard the words that found him out. That this was due to his particular conception of a poet’s proper duty is both clear and unambiguous – but the consequences of his decision were severe. He moved, with his wife Rosemary and their two children, to a small cottage in Templeglantine, the parish of his grandmother. We find again this wish, to situate himself as a poet among his inherited and chosen people, but if Hartnett expected sustenance and a charge of energy, personal and poetical, from this radical dislocation, it cannot be said that his hopes were fulfilled.
Working through Irish
His first publication after the move was in both Irish and English, Cúlú Íde and The Retreat of Ita Cagney.[17] The English text is the stronger of the two, a reflection of the fact that Hartnett’s vocabulary and perhaps grasp of syntactical possibilities in Irish lagged behind his highly developed skills in English, but the bilingual reader will also find a hesitancy in the unfolding of ‘Cúlú Íde’ that is not found in the English version. We should observe here that the English is a version of the Irish, and not a translation.
The Templeglantine years were years of hardship, financial and emotional, for all concerned. Of the work that was produced in that small house, it is likely that only Adharca Broic[18] will stand the test of time. Individual poems still have a luminous clarity (for example, ‘Dán do Lara’), but it is doubtful that Hartnett’s work in Irish can be compared in achievement to that of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, for instance, or Biddy Jenkinson, Liam Ó Muirthile or Gabriel Rosenstock. This is hardly to denigrate the work but rather serves to make the point that Hartnett’s poems in English are for the most part of a higher order than his poems in Irish – and he was too good a poet, and too honest with himself, not to recognise this.
Return to English
One might have expected that when he returned to writing in English, he might have taken up where he left off. Instead, his next collection of poems would make use of a form few, if any, have mastered in English, the haiku. Deceptively simple as a form, the haiku relies on triggering a moment of insight in its reader, or a leap into empathetic understanding that is rarely, if ever, an obvious product of the ostensible narrative. Appearing in 1985, the same year as his translations of the great Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, Hartnett’s Inchicore Haiku[19] is a sequence marked by the modesty of its ambitions and of its ostensible subjects. He had always a keen eye for the natural world, but the cumulative impact of this book-length sequence comes from its accumulation of mood and tone – accusing and self-accusing, rueful, sad, disillusioned, occasionally celebratory, the poems mark a quiet, unshowy, return to the notionally abandoned language. No rhetorical flourish, still less an apology for having been away, there is no backward look here, but neither is there the dexterity, the dance with form and thought, that had marked the poems prior to 1975. This is a subdued Hartnett, defeated in his marriage, in retreat from his retreat. He found a new village in Inchicore, and in a sense, a new people with whom he could feel at home, recognised and accepted for himself. Haikus 86 and 87 are instructive:
Not for the first time, Hartnett’s self-identification with the poor and powerless gives him his milieu, his chosen audience and his set of subjects, but now the environment is not West Limerick, but a proletarian quarter of the capital city where dreams and promises come to die:
Very few of these 87 short poems work as classical haiku – they are mostly too direct and declarative. Then again, the Japanese form relies on linguistic resources in Japanese that do not exist in European languages; perhaps it’s best to think of Hartnett’s haiku as simply short poems in a form approximating to the haiku. The energy of the sequence comes from the juxtaposition of deeply felt personal loneliness with a landscape of low expectations, diminished nature, and disempowerment.
Fresh Poems, fresh powers and visions
Two years later came the bilingual A Necklace of Wrens,[25] followed by Poems to Younger Women[26]entirely in English. There is a startling return to the power and complexity we might have expected had the poet not turned aside from English in 1975. There are dark energies, some cruelty and vitriol, some tenderness, a measure of hard-won self-knowledge and graceful tributes, but above all there is a powerful surge of life and ambition in the verse making – the “polisher of the complex clause, /wizard of grasses and warlock of birds/midnight-oiled in the metric laws” is back, and with heightened powers. If the prevailing note is a kind of bleak celebration of endurance, nevertheless, there is brio, too, the brio of the toreador, resigned to danger and even to death, not quite courting it but aware that it is factored into the dance.
There had always been a visionary streak in the poems. With The Killing of Dreams[27] (1992), a note that is dramatically and defiantly struck, and which finds perhaps its most perfect expression in ‘A Falling Out’, where the muse figure is not just inspiratrix but also the pitiless withholder of the gift.
She comes from a familiar, homely environment of “overcoats and caps”, of “porter taps”, and battering hobnail boots, from
…the cobbles of the market square,
where toothless penny ballads rasped the air,
there among spanners, scollops, hones, and pikes,
limp Greyhound cabbage, mending-kits for bikes…[28]
the familiar small town territory where “she tricked from me my childish, sacred vow.” The first stanza recapitulates Hartnett’s first stepping out into poetry, and the second rehearses his immersion in the written tradition, the variousness and wild range of what has been prompted by this powerful muse figure. Hartnett offers as her territory a landscape where ultimately all poets are doomed victims of the urge to create: she takes, and then dismisses, out of hand/ the men and women that she most does bless.[29] Sacred capriciousness is one of the qualities Graves attributes to his White Goddess, but where Graves sees the poet as inescapably bound to her rule, heroically stoic, waiting for when the next bright blow may fall, Hartnett, radically, dismisses his muse:
…at dawn I give her bed a gentle shove
and amputate the antennae of love
and watch the river carry her away
into the silence of a senseless bay
where light ignores the facets of her rings
and where the names are not the names of things.[30]
The poem has the air of a poetic suicide note, opening on initiation, closing on repudiation of the gift, and might well have served to close out the poet’s life and work – but perhaps we might read it better as a gambler’s bluff, a kind of dare? In ‘Didactic’ he tells us, bluntly, “the imagination has no limits./ Art has”. [31]
The eye has turned inward, the poet considers whether or not he has outlived his allotted span, ‘… he flounders out of bounds,/ his panacea mocked by a disease/ it was never meant to cure’.[32] Life as a painful site of anguish has been a subdominant theme since Inchicore Haiku. By now it is coming to dominate his imagination, and in poem after poem we find a casting about for release:
For all that, there is something redemptive in the seven-part sequence ‘Mountains, Fall on Us’, a sustained and unflinching set of poems where the suffering man transcends his “list of childish woes”, and faces the hard facts of his life, as man and poet, with stoic acceptance. In the first part we are given a vulnerable figure, a gay man with aesthetic instincts at the mercy of cruel Spanish Catholicism, its ‘jeering trumpets’ redeemed by ‘some kindly waiter’ who ‘kindly dabbed/the distraught mascara from his face’. The second part evokes the poet’s ‘fatal childish dream’ of the life of ease marked out for him; the third section evokes a muse figure whom we might well trace back, to his Grandmother, whose ‘milestones are novenas for the dead’; in the fourth, we find a frank admission that he sits ‘in a soul I do not want’, living ‘this life which has no joy in it’, and in the fifth section the Alexandrian Cavafy is evoked, whose ‘real poems told of real pain’.
This trying on of roles, of lives, of identities, figures the possibilities open to the imagination which has no limits, but is true to the limits of art. In the final two sections, there is a resolute dismissal of all avenues of escape. In the end, he must hang ‘on the great loneliness/of his forgotten cross’, the outcast and thief who ‘asked for mercy and was snubbed by Christ’.
A man without a people.
In 1991, he translated John of the Cross into Irish.[34] In 1993, he published his lucid translations of Haicéad,[35] and his definitive, nuanced, and sensitive, translation of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille[36] was completed in advance of his death in 1999. Two magisterial poems were left in him; they appeared in Selected and New Poems[37](1994), ‘He’ll to the Moors’; and ‘Sibelius in Silence’. New Poems (1990-1999) added a slight afterthought to the life’s work – followed by the posthumous A Book of Strays in 2002 – but to all intents and purposes, these two long poems wrote the finis.
The slant towards death and silence
In a bravura keynote address to Éigse Michael Hartnett[38] in 2009, Paul Durcan suggested that Hartnett was possessed of a mediaeval Catholic imagination. ‘He’ll to the Moors’ traces the life of the mystic Ramon Lull, from his beginnings as a troubadour and lover, observer of birds and the ordinary minutiae of the natural world, to the polemicist for Christ who found no rest in the world until he was stoned to death in Tunisia. Durcan argues that this ostensible biography is in fact a species of cloaked autobiography; it traces the arc of Hartnett’s life in parallel to that of its subject, from insouciant celebrant of the small things, through the harrowed fields of desire and disputation until, at the end, he achieves the martyrdom that was always his destiny and his apotheosis. Durcan recruited the poet Michael Coady to his characterisation of Hartnett’s imagination:
‘At heart he was perhaps a classically Irish mix of tidal faith and fatalism – intuitively in touch with a deeply buried Mediterranean impulse in the Irish psyche and native language, but one historically and climatically done down by the fateful alliance of puritan incursions from the east and constant troughs of low pressure from the west…’
[Michael Coady’s Sleeve Notes for the Claddagh Records CD of Hartnett reading his own work]
The CD was issued by Claddagh Records, and in the notes we find Coady’s suggestive claim that “as with all true poets, a mysterious potency of verbal enchantment was at the core of his gift.” The shifts in register, the command of the inscape and outscape of his matter, the baffled and heartbroken humanity of the poem, show a poet in full command of a what is still a considerable gift.
At this point, in the full grip of alcoholism and its attendant furies, Hartnett was much occupied with gathering in the threads of his life, as if rehearsing and preparing an exit he felt drawing inexorably closer. He would write poems yet, short lyrics of uneven quality, but before he came to the desolate child’s cry of ‘A Prayer for Sleep’, the final poem in the 2001 Collected Poems, came the panoramic, cold splendour of ‘Sibelius in Silence’. In this poem, Hartnett revisits the handful of themes that haunted him all his life: the artist’s responsibility to the gift, to tradition and to his own people, and then the struggle to be at home in world and nation, self-doubt and the courage to outlast silence, the quarrel with history, and above all the sense that the lone sensibility cannot hope to overcome the brute weight of the world’s indifference. The chosen extended silence of Sibelius echoes Hartnett’s earlier “I have poems to hand/it’s words I cannot find.” Both poet and composer know that, to be true to the strictures of the art, one must find the discipline and courage to seek and withstand the silence out of which everything comes, into which everything must go.
Hartnett was fascinated by the elected silence the composer sought, until he emerged with what he considered the voice itself of the place itself, speaking itself:
I offer you here cold, pure water –
as against the ten-course tone poems,
the indigestible Mahlerian feasts;
as against the cocktails; many hues,
all liquors crammed in one glass –
pure, cold water is what I offer.
(Collected Poems p. 227)
The question is to what degree Hartnett conflates himself with Sibelius. Is Sibelius a mask he put on in order to confront himself, or is the poem intended as an homage, of one troubled soul acknowledging unresolvable ambiguity, in this question that can only be answered with “it is both and neither”.
When we consider the place of the poem in Hartnett’s long contribution to poetry, there is something heartbreakingly final about the concluding lines to what is, in effect, Hartnett’s farewell to poetry:
…that which was part of me has not left me yet –
however etherialised, I still know when it’s there.
I get up at odd hours of the night
or snap from a doze deep in a chair;
I shuffle to the radio, switch on the set,
and pluck, as I did before, Finlandia out of the air.
(p. 228)
He is far from Castletown house, and the plangent evocation of Tortellier; far, too, from the ballads and company of Maiden Street pubs, far from the poems of his Gaelic predecessors, from Lorca, from the austerity of Pasternak and the dark meditations of John of the Cross. One last great effort, a tour de force, and he lays down his pen, as “Into my room across my music-sheets/ sail black swans on blacker rivers”.
[1] Dennis O’Driscoll, The Outnumbered Poet (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2013, P. 199
[2] Michael Hartnett, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Fallon (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2001) p. 139
[34] Michael Hartnett, Dánta Naomh Eoin na Croise (Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim, 1991)
[35] Michael Hartnett, Haicéad (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1993)
[36] Michael Hartnett, Ó Rathaille: The Poems of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1999)
[37] Michael Hartnett, Selected and New Poems, (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1994
[38] Paul Durcan, ‘He’ll to the Moors’ (originally given as ‘Michael Hartnett’s Way of the Cross – the Final Quest’, keynote address at Eigse Michael Hartnett, Newcastle West, April 2009).
About the Author:
The poet Theo Dorgan. Source: Fingal Poetry Festival
Theo Dorgan is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer, translator, librettist and documentary screenwriter. He lives in Dublin with his wife, the poet and playwright Paula Meehan.
Dorgan was born in Cork in 1953 and was educated in North Monastery School. He completed a BA in English and philosophy and an MA in English at University College Cork, after which he tutored and lectured at that university, while simultaneously being literature officer at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork.
After Dorgan’s first two poetry collections, The Ordinary House of Love and Rosa Mundi, went out of print, Dedalus Press reissued these two titles in a single volume, What This Earth Cost Us. He has also published selected poems in Italian, La Case ai Margini del Mundo (Faenza, Moby Dick, 1999).
He has edited The Great Book of Ireland (with Gene Lambert, 1991); Revising the Rising (with Máirín Ní Dhonnachadha, 1991); Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1996); Watching the River Flow (with Noel Duffy, Dublin, Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann, 1999); The Great Book of Gaelic (with Malcolm Maclean, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2002); and The Book of Uncommon Prayer (Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2007).
He has been the series editor of the European Poetry Translation Network publications and director of the collective translation seminars from which the books arose.
A former director of Poetry Ireland, Dorgan has worked as a broadcaster of literary programmes on both radio and television. He was the presenter of Poetry Now on RTÉ Radio 1, and later for RTÉ Television’s books programme, Imprint. He was the scriptwriter for the television documentary series Hidden Treasures. His Jason and the Argonauts, set to music by Howard Goodall, was commissioned by and premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2004. A series of text pieces by Dorgan feature in the dance musical Riverdance; he was specially commissioned to create them for the theatrical show. His songs have been recorded by a number of musicians, including Alan Stivell, Jimmy Crowley and Cormac Breathnach.
Dorgan was awarded the Listowel Prize for Poetry in 1992 and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Poetry in 2010. A member of Aosdána, he was appointed as a member of the Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon) from 2003 to 2008. He also served on the board of Cork European Capital of Culture 2005.
He was awarded the 2015 Poetry Now Award for Nine Bright Shiners.
Éigse stalwart, Vicki Nash, pictured next to the 1971 portrait of Michael Hartnett by artist Edward McGuire, which was on display for the opening ceremony of Éigse 2022.
In academic circles, when poetic legacies, such as that of Michael Hartnett, are thrashed out and explored, there is always, of necessity, a legacy BUT. BUT… he passed away in mid-sentence; his potential was unfulfilled, etc., etc. We leave such debates to the continuing academic interest in Hartnett, but for those of us who love Michael Hartnett, the debate has already been won. His core work, what we see in his numerous collections, his brilliant work as a translator, and his lyrical evocation of a Maiden Street upbringing (‘we were such golden children never to be dust’) and his other mischievous local interventions, are timeless and will stand the test of time – no ifs, ands or buts.
For those of us who are true believers, Michael Hartnett’s legacy as one of the central figures in modern Irish poetry is guaranteed. The Éigse Michael Hartnett festival, held annually throughout the town in schools, the library, the Red Door Gallery, the Desmond Complex, St. Ita’s Hospital, the Longcourt House Hotel, and in the ever-dwindling number of local pubs, celebrates that legacy each year. The festival’s wide-ranging and diverse programme creates an atmosphere of warmth and conviviality, perfect for lively gatherings, easy conversation, and spirited debate.
While his memory still lingers among us, however, the pace of change is relentless. The Newcastle West he wrote so roguishly about has faded into the past, living on only in memory and in his verse. Many of the central characters in these sagas, such as Tony Sheehan, Peg Devine, Tony Roche, Jimmy Deere, John Bourke, Billy the Barber, Pat Whelan, Ned O’Dwyer or Ned Lynch, are no longer readily remembered by the young people of the town. Each year, however, they are recalled, remembered and celebrated in Éigse Michael Hartnett.
The Michael Hartnett Poetry Award is now worth a whopping €8,000, and the list of winners over the past twenty-five years is impressive. Many of those poets have gone on to achieve national prominence. And, in the intervening years since the unveiling of that statue by fellow poet Paul Durcan on April 16th, 2011, Durcan’s hope that the statue would become a meeting place, a rendezvous, for parents and children, for schoolchildren, friends, and lovers has come to be a reality.
Michael Hartnett deserves all these efforts to keep his legacy alive – and, some would argue, the time has come for a more permanent centre to attract tourists and scholars to the town. The Éigse organisers welcome recent efforts to establish a permanent Arts and Cultural Centre in Newcastle West. This town needs to be a centre for the continued study of the poet’s work and a recognised repository for his papers and other materials before they are lost forever. It has been done successfully in Bellaghy and Inniskeen, so why not in Newcastle West?
Hartnett’s eclectic legacy is assured: his poetry in Irish and in English; his translations of modern Irish poets and of Ó’Bruadair, Haicéid and Ó Rathaille; his ‘local’ poems in Newcastle West and Inchicore; his engagement with the thorny issue of Irish nationalism and language at a time in the 70s during great political unrest without introducing any of the usual tribal undertones, will always be respected and applauded.
In recent times, we salute those who ensured that Hartnett’s iconic portrait by artist Edward McGuire was purchased by Limerick City and County Council on behalf of Limerick City Gallery of Art. Like Hartnett himself, the portrait returns after a lengthy exile and will now forever be available to view locally. However, in our continuing efforts to further Hartnett’s legacy, we can and must do more.
The decade from 1975 to 1985 in Glendarragh, Templeglantine, was arguably the most productive of his career. Adharca Broic was published in 1978, followed by An Phurgóid in 1983, Do Nuala: Foighne Crainn in 1984 and his fourth collection in Irish, An Lia Nocht, appeared in 1985. During this period, he also undertook the translation of Daibhi Ó Brudair’s poems, which were published in 1985. In parallel to this ‘serious’ output, he was writing and entertaining the locals with ballads, some serious or semi-serious like ‘A Ballad on the State of the Nation’, which was distributed as a one-page pamphlet like the ballads of old and even included original linocuttings by local artist Cliodhna Cussen. Other ballads were more contentious and even semi-libellous (or fully slanderous!), such as ‘The Balad (sic) of Salad Sunday’ and ‘The Duck Lovers Dance’. These latter creations were written under the very appropriate nom de plume, ‘The Wasp’!
It has to be remembered that at this time, Newcastle West and its West Limerick hinterland were booming. The Alcan plant in Aughinish Island near Askeaton was under construction and every man, woman and child was working there. Added to this, every spare room was occupied as up to 4,000 workers from all over Ireland were involved in the construction phase of the project. The idyll of coming back home to a quiet rural backwater conducive to creativity in West Limerick was shattered by this unexpected and localised economic progress. Ironically, while Michael was enjoying the Klondike atmosphere in the hostelries of Newcastle West, his wife Rosemary was working as the Personal Assistant to the Managing Director of the newly commissioned Alcan Aluminium site.
This surely goes to the heart of the tragedy of what was Michael Hartnett’s life as a poet. The literary and academic world tried in vain to accommodate him, although this help and recognition may have come too late to save him from the clutches of alcoholism. While the annual Éigse sets out to maintain his rich legacy and celebrate his genius, it does tend to sugar-coat his reputation and often the big elephant in the room is ignored. This must be a continuing source of frustration to his wife, Rosemary, his children and his surviving family members in and around Newcastle West.
The sad reality for Michael and his family was that he did not avail himself fully of the many opportunities that were offered to him in the 1970s and later. Rosemary bemoans the fact that while his contemporaries, such as Montague, Durcan, Kennelly and Heaney all wrote poetry, they also managed to earn a salary, whereas her husband ‘spurned all opportunities to do anything except write poetry and drink!’
He was the first recipient of a bursary from the Irish American Cultural Institute in 1974, which allowed him and his wife, Rosemary, to put a deposit on a cottage in the townland of Glendarragh, Templeglantine. In that same year, he was awarded both the Irish American Literature Award and the Arts Council Award. Following his return to West Limerick, he was employed for a brief time as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Thomond College of Physical Education (now the University of Limerick), but his tenure there was patchy and temporary.
Thus, at age 34, one would presume that Michael was free to pursue his calling as a poet and enjoy the countryside ‘out foreign in ‘Glantine’. A good fairy, his wife Rosemary, paid the mortgage and all the bills and dealt with bureaucratic matters. She did it willingly because she believed in him and loved him and because she did not want her children to starve.
Sadly, it seems that his obsession with poetry and drink left very little room for any other relationships to thrive and survive, and this included his marriage to Rosemary. The acclaimed documentary by Pat Collins, A Necklace of Wrens (1999), ends with a very poignant, philosophical reverie as to whether Hartnett saw poetry as a gift or a curse:
It’s very difficult to describe where poetry comes from. It certainly was given to me, but so were my brown eyes and my big ears. They are just part of what I am, to coin a phrase. I believe it’s a gift, certainly, and I’m lucky to have it. But also it’s a curse, so I’m in two moods about it really. I could say I did it all myself, which would be a total lie because there’s an entire three or four thousand years of tradition behind me in many languages. But whether it was given or not, I can’t answer that question. It just turned up and I turned up to meet it and we met at the crossroads and got married and we’re still married.
Michael Hartnett had a great predilection for romantic yarns. If they weren’t true, he was amused by the way they were taken up, including by the media and even sometimes by academics. Most of these myths, created by Hartnett to suit his own nefarious purposes, are trotted out again and again. One example of what passes for analysis:
At the age of three, Hartnett was sent to live with his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, who lived in Camas, a townland in the parish of Templeglantine, west of Newcastle West. He was educated in the local primary school, and then in the well-known and enlightened St. Ita’s secondary school in Tarbert, Co. Kerry, run by the redoubtable Jane Agnes McKenna, a school that would later boast both Gabriel Fitzmaurice and Brendan Kennelly as alumni (McDonagh, Newman 15).
Hartnett, himself a master of misinformation and disinformation, would have been very impressed with the inventive mythmaking in this piece. For the record, Brigid Halpin’s cottage in Camas is situated about a mile from the village of Raheenagh in the parish of Kileedy. While it is true that he spent some time with his grandmother before beginning school and frequently thereafter for short stays at weekends and during school holidays, he attended Primary School in Newcastle West, first in Scoil Iosef and later in the long-established Courtenay Boys’ School. He then attended the very well-known and enlightened St. Ita’s Secondary School in Newcastle West, which was run by Jim Breen and where his English teacher was Billy O’Donnell.
Many of the myths surrounding Hartnett relate to Brigid Halpin, his grandmother. The reality is that she was not a native Irish speaker; he was not ‘fostered out’ to her for long periods in his childhood, and he did not learn Irish in her lowly cottage in Camas. Neither was she born in 1870, as he suggests in the famous Pat Collins documentary. We know from Census records that she was a mere 80 years of age when she died alone in St. Ita’s Hospital, Newcastle West, in 1965. These inaccuracies continue to appear in much of what passes for scholarly research and analysis since he passed away in 1999, and, as I pointed out earlier, some of the biggest culprits are local.
Despite this, Hartnett’s legacy is assured but demands continued and vigorous investigation. While Declan Kiberd lavishes praise on Hartnett for being ‘the greatest translator of Irish-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century’, he also bemoans the fact that ‘he is also his country’s most underrated poet (Kiberd, 381). From the lofty heights where Heaney declares that Hartnett is the ‘authentic heir to the poets of the Maigue’ to those in the many hostelries he visited who dismissed him as an annoyance, there is the growing realisation of the truth in his son Niall’s observation that, ‘My father was many men to many people’ (McDonagh and Newman, 7). Seamus Heaney remembers the frisson of electric energy which followed a Hartnett book launch – he says it was akin to a ‘power surge’ in the national grid. He continues:
Yet despite that, his achievement was under-noticed. Slight of build and disinclined to flaunt himself on the literary scene, he was always more focused on his creative journey than on career moves. Edward McGuire’s portrait catches this singular intensity, but the response to his writings has been less definitive.’
Hartnett’s son, Niall, in an article in the Sunday Independent, on September 30th, 2024, spells out the current reality:
“His legacy as a poet is hard to gauge. His legacy is still spreading in Ireland, especially through the school system, although slowing in my opinion. But progress internationally is at a snail’s pace, sadly. My hope is that the school-goers of today in Ireland will be the next to carry his torch in the future to a wider audience.”
And as we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hartnett’s passing, we can see that time moves on and new poets emerge and are celebrated each year at Éigse Michael Hartnett in Newcastle West, and in Listowel and Dromineer and many other far-flung Literary Festivals whose aim is to foster and nurture and give a platform to the young, vibrant successors of Hartnett.
Twenty-five years on, the judgement of John McDonagh and Stephen Newman made shortly after his passing still holds true:
His body of work is a testament to his lifelong struggle with complacency and a desire to write with honesty and integrity that marks him out as one of the most overlooked yet influential Irish poets of the twentieth century (McDonagh, Newman, 24).
Prophets are never recognised in their own countries. Until, that is, they make themselves irremovable landmarks on our landscapes and streetscapes. The once-banished artist returns as a statue in our most cherished Square, an Éigse Literary and Arts Festival to honour him in perpetuity. Hartnett deserves all these accolades. He was at times painfully honest, very acerbic at other times, but always truthful until it hurt. Emerson had him in mind when, in his famous definition of friendship, he states, ‘Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo’, and he concludes with the admonition: ‘Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untameable and devoutly revered’.
References:
Collins, Pat. Film documentary A Necklace of Wrens (1999).
Hartnett, Rosemary, in correspondence with the author.
Kiberd, Declan. The Double Vision of Michael Hartnett in After Ireland: Writing the nation from Beckett to the present, Head of Zeus UK, 2017.
McDonagh, J., Newman, S. (eds). Remembering Michael Hartnett, Four Courts Press Ltd., Dublin, 2006.
Michael Hartnett, his wife Rosemary and daughter Lara.
Paula Meehan in full flow, delivering her eloquent ‘Letter to Michael Hartnett’ on the Opening Night of Éigse Michael Hartnett, 2025. The photograph is by Dermot Lynch
As part of our preparations for Éigse 2025 we decided to ask Paula Meehan to be our special guest on Opening Night, 2nd of October. Her remit was to ‘speak from the heart about her memories of Michael Hartnett’. She did so by framing her thoughts in the form of ‘A Letter to Michael Hartnett’ – a wonderful prose poem. This was written on the 1st of October 2025, the night before the Éigse in his name opened in his native Newcastle West, County Limerick. The result is truly magnificent and deserves to be shared with Michael’s family, his many friends and ardent followers who didn’t make it to the Library in Newcastle West on that momentous night.
Dearest Michael,
Tomorrow I will rise with the sun and take to the road, and by eight-ish I will stand to speak of you before a crowd of your devotees in your home town where your name will be on everyone’s lips. Being blessed for the most part — but you have to allow, as you’d say yourself: there’s always the one.
The Éigse, founded in your name, will be opened with ceremonials and celebrations through all the arts, on its twenty-fifth birthday. If fate allows, I’ll be there to sing your praises, to sing them to the high heavens, where I hope you reside with the cherubim and seraphim, your ears ringing with their choral magic. I’ll say you were and are of greatness wrought. I’ll offer gratitude for the poems you carried, for the pure music of your shining spirit. So many of us will be gathered in your name and cherishing all you stand for.
I’ll be aware, too, of your black sardonic eye on proceedings somewhere in the otherwhere of elsewhere; aware especially of how you hated poets going on, and on. And weren’t afraid to let them know. Now as I enter my anecdotage and my crankitude, I can hear your voice in my ear:
‘Just tell them I’m not the worst.’
That’s what you whispered one night as I rose to introduce you to students in a small back room, over fifty years ago. After the reading they would have died for you, each and every one of them, so thoroughly had you enchanted them. I remember the joke you told them at the end of your reading: ‘What do you get if you cross a donkey with a bag of onions? A ride that would bring tears to your eyes’.
‘Come to the Éigse,’ said Norma Prendiville, ‘and speak from the heart about Michael for twenty minutes.’ Michael, I’ll speak from the heart you broke. You broke the hearts of all of us who loved you.
You were our purest poet. Our own Orpheus.
Even Eavan Boland, who reckoned there was no Orpheus in Ireland, came to understand the Orphic nature of your lyric. I extract from ‘Irish Poetry’, the poem she dedicated to you, where she tells how over a pot of tea one winter’s evening you —
began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon:
No Attic light for them and no Herodotus.
But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs they spent their winters on.
And the pitch-black Atlantic night. And how the sound of a bird’s wing in a lost language sounded.
You made the noise for me. Made it again. Until I could see the flight of it: suddenly
the silvery, lithe rivers of your south-west
lay down in silence. And the savage acres no one could predict
were all at ease, soothed and quiet and
listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.
Eavan, who always referred to you as Mikey, with great fondness.
I first met you, Michael, in Grogan’s Castle Lounge in South William Street in my native city of Dublin. The poet’s horror hole a friend called it, a poet already sober, a rare enough thing in Grogan’s Castle Lounge. In those days fadó, fadó.
It is nineteen eighty-three and I am just back home to Dublin. I have been studying for a Masters of Fine Arts degree, in Washington State in the far Northwest of the United States. I brought two slim volumes with me when I left for the States – poets I had never met in person, but I considered them poetical mother and father to my craft or sullen art.
The books were Eavan Boland’s 1980 volume In Her Own Image and your 1975 volume A Farewell to English. When I met you that first time in Grogans, introduced by Tommy Smith, I told you I had the whole of the title poem, dedicated to Brendan Kennelly, by heart. Go on so, said you, prove it. I did. By heart. With only a few wobbles.
I think you were gobsmacked. You asked to see poems for, you said, I must be a poet. I showed you one I had in my pocket — do young poets still carry new poems on their person? Maybe on their mobile phones ….. I showed you one and you said it wasn’t very good. I showed you another and you said that was much better. The real thing. Of course, I paid no heed to your critique. Isn’t arrogance a protective force when you’re a baby poet?
If I had the whole poem by heart then, I have only fragments now, but it comes back to me when I need it. It gets me through as much as it gets through to me, the beautiful, sustained meditation on our politics. our culture, our colonised minds. Your masterpiece of scorn and hurt and resistance.
In the choppy waves of loneliness in an American university the poems kept me on some kind of even keel. They were part of the reason I came back to Ireland despite the terrible prospects.
‘What are you going home for? Sure all the kids are going the other way?’ ’What are you coming home for. There’s no work here.’
The era of last one to leave the country turn out the lights. The era of redundancies, butter vouchers, dole queues, heroin hitting the poor communities of the inner city like a juggernaut, moving statues, The Kerry Babies, Anne Lovett, The Heavy Gang. The Troubles live on TV every night.
You understood I came home to get the poems I needed to get.
What did we talk of on those walks by the Camac River, that palindromic waterway? Oh, you could fascinate from Akhmatova to Zozimus. You were dazzling in your erudition. You had the names, and the naming and so took possession of every blooming thing, of every wingèd thing and creature of the riparian zone. In two tongues.
I found blessing and curse in every poem. You were countryman. You were cosmopolite. You were ancient. You were avant garde. You were honey. You were vitriol.
Kind. Ferocious. Wicked. Lonely. So lonely, Michael, for your boy and your girl, for Niall and Lara, your beautiful children.
I carried your poem ‘Death of an Irishwoman’ like a holy fire. You understood that the most important culture bearers come in humble guise, like the Zen master scrubbing the kitchen floor of the monastery. Your ‘ignorant’ grandmother Bridget Halpin, who gave you Irish, who handed you the tool you would use to decolonise your mind. Decolonise our minds.
You were the wounded healer.
Death of an Irishwoman
Ignorant, in the sense she ate monotonous food and thought the world was flat, and pagan, in the sense she knew the things that moved at night were neither dogs nor cats but púcas and darkfaced men, she nevertheless had fierce pride. But sentenced in the end to eat thin diminishing porridge in a stone-cold kitchen she clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand. I loved her from the day she died. She was a summer dance at the crossroads. She was a card game where a nose was broken. She was a song that nobody sings. She was a house ransacked by soldiers. She was a language seldom spoken. She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.
I carried that poem into workshops, workshops in universities, in prisons (sometimes on the same day). I read it with women prisoners, with the political prisoners in Portlaoise, with the men in Arbour Hill High Security Prison, in recovery programmes. I brought it into art colleges, into classrooms all over the country, into other countries.
Everyone has loved someone from the day they died. Some creature. Some thing.
Only last week at a workshop in Kilmore Quay, I read that poem and there was a gasp, an audible intake of breath on the line, ‘I loved her from the day she died.’ She will never die, your grandmother, bearer of Irish, cultural heroine, your grandmother Bridget Halpin.
Those last few years of your life, your ever faithful friend Tony Curtis would drive myself and Theo (Dorgan) out to Dundrum, where you lived close by what you called The Sentimental Hospital, known to the rest of us as The Central Mental Hospital. You were dying in the loving care of Angela Liston.
The October of your going was radiant and glorious. But the day of your funeral it lashed. Early to the town for the burial, we took shelter in a pub. A man came in and said there’s a fierce crowd in for a funeral. Dinny Hartnett, the postman, his brother the poet is after dying. You would have liked that, Michael. You would like that the woman in the Pound Shop gave us armfuls of umbrellas, all the umbrellas in the shop, and wouldn’t take any money. Sure bring them back when the funeral’s over.
I did a poetry reading in Limerick a while back, in the City Gallery under Eddie Maguire’s magnificent portrait of you, the one on the front of your Collected Poems. Una McCarthy, who has recently retired as Director of the Gallery, had fought a long, hard battle to wrest the funding for it and get it back to Limerick from a private collection in the United States. You hung there, your black eyes boring into me, as intensely as they had in life. You could read minds, an uncanny gift. You were drawn to the wounded in bar or street. I saw people open to you like flowers – they felt your nobility of spirit, your deeply empathetic heart.
Michael, I hope wherever you are that this Éigse energy in the streets of the town of your birth will touch you. Your name is on every tongue. You are cast in bronze in the marketplace. The rain flows down your beautiful face, mingles with the tears you shed for your mother, for your father in his blanket of snow.
I send this letter into the void, dear Michael, in gratitude, devotion and fond memory.
Sincerely,
P. Meehan
Paula Meehan. Photograph by Dermot Lynch
About the Author
Paula Meehan was born in Dublin in 1955, the eldest of six children. She attended a number of primary schools, finishing her primary education at the Central Model Girls’ School off Gardiner Street. She began her secondary education at St. Michael’s Holy Faith Convent in Finglas but was expelled for organising a protest march against the regime of the school. She studied for her Intermediate Certificate on her own and then went to Whitehall House Senior College, to study for her Leaving Certificate.
Outside school, she was a member of a dance drama group, became involved in band culture and, around 1970, began to write lyrics. Gradually composing song lyrics would give way to writing poetry.
At Trinity College, Dublin, (1972–1977) she studied English, History and Classical Civilization, taking five years to complete her Bachelor of Arts degree. This included one year off, spent travelling through Europe. While a student she was involved in street theatre and various kinds of performance.
After college she travelled again, spending long stretches in Greece, Germany, Scotland and England. She was offered a teaching fellowship at Eastern Washington University where she studied (1981–1983) in a two-year programme which led to a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry. She returned to Dublin in 1983.
Meehan has also written poetry for film, for contemporary dance companies and for collaborations with visual artists; her poems have been put to music by songwriters (including Christy Moore). Her poetry has been extensively published in translation, including substantial collections in French and German.
The 2015 Poetry Competition ‘A Poem for Ireland’ shortlisted her 1991 poem ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’ in the final ten poems. She selected poems for and introduced the Candlestick Press anthology Ten Poems from Ireland in 2017. Meehan was a judge for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.
In September 2013, Meehan was installed as the Ireland Professor of Poetry by President Michael D. Higgins.
In 2023, she was elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
One of my favourite, enigmatic sports photos of all time! Mick Mackey (umpire) and Christy Ring have a few words as Ring is forced to leave the fray during the 1957 Munster semi-final.
Reconstructionists
By Michael Hartnett
The GAA decided
the time had come to explain
to very puzzled tourists
the rules of the Hurling Game.
So, as things are quiet in winter,
their decision was to ask
the lads from the Office of Public Works
to help them with their task –
to build an Interpretive Centre;
to unbaffle Icelanders,
Dutchmen, Danes and Turks,
to educate visitors
and not leave them in the dark,
and to site this latest venture –
where else, but in Croke Park!
The day came for unveiling
and there in snow-white ranks
stood shining sheds of limestone,
with Celtic septic tanks
to service all the toilets
with their sparkling tiles and taps;
and there was a lecture room
hung with very detailed maps
to point the way to Thurles
for Libyans, Letts and Lapps;
and a foyer aglow like the Book of Kells
with an undecipherable graph
that’s explained the whole year ‘round
by the full-time staff
of two. And for all the lovely money
a Foreign Currency Exchange
clad in gleaming quartz-stone
left over from Newgrange.
And a genuine Irish siopa té
with genuine soda bread
made brown with genuine turf dust
to sink in your belly like lead
(one slice of that and, d’you know what,
you’ll swear that you’ve been fed!).
The Fathers of the Nation
rejoiced and they were glad
(the Mother of the Nation
Was somewhere west of Chad);
but none of these wise leaders
had foreseen the tiny hitch –
the lads from the Office of Public Works
had built their Temple of Plumbing
in the middle of the pitch!
Note:
This poem, despite its rather enigmatic and unwieldy title, hides a gem of satire underneath! In the poem, Hartnett foresees the building of the Croke Park Museum, which eventually opened its doors to the public in September 1998, just before the poet’s untimely passing in October 1999. In typical Hartnett fashion, he never misses an opportunity to take a wry, satirical sideswipe at the Government and, in this case, its Office of Public Works. Little did he realise that a quarter of a century later, the line Minister for the Office of Public Works would be fellow Newcastle West native, Minister Patrick O’Donovan, whose family once lived next door to Hartnett in Assumpta Park!
Needless to say, today, the Croke Park Museum is a state-of-the-art building and a mecca for locals and tourists alike from diverse locations, including Iceland, Lapland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Turkey! It is a celebration of the history, development and heritage of Gaelic games and the GAA itself. It houses artefacts related to the Association’s foundation and its most famous players. The museum is home to the original Sam Maguire and Liam MacCarthy Cups.
By the way, his phrase ‘the Mother of the Nation’ is a reference to Mary Robinson, an Irish politician who served as President of Ireland from December 1990 to September 1997. She was this country’s first female President. She has since gone on to work with distinction as an Elder, and she continues to campaign globally on issues of civil rights and climate change.
References
Hartnett, Michael. A Book of Strays, edited by Peter Fallon, Gallery Press, 2002 (reprinted 2015).
A Geohive Hub aerial view of Bridget Halpin’s cottage in Camas taken in 2006.
Camas is a small nondescript townland nestling in the shadow of the nearby village of Ratheenagh in rural West Limerick. In the Author’s Notes to his Collected Poems (2001), Michael Hartnett tells us that, ‘Camas is a townland five miles south of Newcastle West in County Limerick where I spent most of my childhood’. This local townland proved to be a central element in his early development. There, the young impressionable Hartnett was influenced by his people, particularly his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, and their customs and way of life. Indeed, in the mid-70s, when he tired of the Dublin literary milieu, it was to this same rural West Limerick bastion, nearby Glendarragh in Templeglantine, still steeped in Irish music and culture, to which he returned. It was to this place he came to escape Dublin’s incestuous stranglehold and perhaps to write a new chapter “out foreign in ‘Glantine”.
There are up to fifteen poems by Hartnett which could be considered ‘Camas Poems’. These memory poems are all based on his childhood recollections of those happy times in his grandmother’s kitchen. Students of Hartnett’s poetry should consider studying ‘A Small Farm’ (Collected Poems 15) as one of a series of memory poems that he wrote celebrating his grandmother, Bridget Halpin and the townland of Camas where she lived. The most obvious of these Camas Poems is ‘Death of an Irishwoman’ (Collected Poems 139), which he wrote on the passing of his grandmother in 1965. Others include ‘For My Grandmother Bridget Halpin’ (Collected Poems 52), and ‘Mrs Halpin and the Lightning’ Collected Poems 138) and of course ‘An Múince Dreoilíní ‘/ ‘A Necklace of Wrens’ (A Necklace of Wrens 18), a quintessential memory poem from childhood.
Hartnett’s early poetry creates a delicate balance between description and abstraction, the actual and the figurative. The poem ‘A Small Farm’, the first poem of the Collected Poems (2001), a memory poem dating from Hartnett’s teenage years, establishes this. Abstractions, clichés, their representation through language, and the moment where these are drawn into focus, made specific and immediate, are central. The setting of the ‘small farm’ is described en abstracto: ‘All the perversions of the soul / I learnt on a small farm’ (15). In contrast to other contemporary representations of Irish farm homesteads, most obviously Kavanagh’s ‘Inniskeen’, and Heaney’s ‘Anahorish’, there is no naming of place here. The picture of the farm is rather etched out in generalisation and aphorism, and through the accordant clichés of petty hatred and ignorance, ‘how to do the neighbours harm / by magic, how to hate’ (15), before Hartnett brings the glass into focus, employing idiosyncratic detail which establishes the world of the poem itself. In this way, Hartnett’s particular subjectivity, his way of seeing, is established. It would become his poetic currency:
Here were rosary beads,
a bleeding face,
the glinting doors that did encase their cutler needs,
their plates, their knives, the cracked calendars of their lives. (15)
In the final stanza, Hartnett makes an explicit link between his awakening as a perceiver of social interactions and moments of poetic beauty, with a growing knowledge and identification with the natural world:
I was abandoned to their tragedies and began to count the birds,
to deduce secrets in the kitchen cold,
and to avoid among my nameless weeds
the civil war of that household. (15)
The attentive intellect which ‘counts the birds’ has as yet no language to describe or express his experience of the natural world, his ‘nameless weeds’. Still, he is possessive of it, seeing it as distinct from the human society which he can describe, yet does not identify with.
The ‘small farm’ referred to here belonged to his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, and like many other small holdings in Camas, it consisted of a meagre ten acres, three roods and thirteen perches. This woman, Bridget Halpin, would later wield great influence over her young grandson, Michael Hartnett. Indeed, if we are to believe the poet, she was the one who first affirmed his poetic gift when one day he ran into her kitchen in Camas and told her that a nest of young wrens had alighted on his head. Her reply to him was, ‘Aha, you’re going to be a poet!’. (A more detailed genealogy of the Halpin family and the early formative influences on Michael Hartnett can be read here).
Bridget Halpin’s small farm of ten acres, three roods and thirteen perches, which was so vital in the early development of one of our greatest poets. This view is taken from a Geohive Hub aerial view taken in 2006.
Hartnett claimed that he spent much of his early childhood in Bridget Halpin’s cottage in the rural townland of Camas, five miles from his home in nearby Newcastle West. He went on to immortalise this woman in many of his poems, but especially in his beautiful poem, ‘Death of an Irishwoman’. This quiet townland of Camas must therefore be seen as central to his development as a poet, and maybe in time, this early association with Camas will be given its rightful importance, and the little rural townland will vie with Maiden Street or Inchicore as one of Hartnett’s important formative places.
‘Camas Road’, Michael Hartnett’s first ever published work, appeared in the Limerick Weekly Echo on the 18th of June 1955. He was thirteen. The poem describes the rural vista of the West Limerick townland of Camas at evening: ‘A bridge, a stream, a long low hedge, / A cottage thatched with golden straw’ (A Book of Strays 67). Its two eight-line stanzas of alternating rhyme and regular metre contain a litany of natural images, at times idiosyncratically rendered; the ‘timid hare sits in the ditch’, ‘the soft lush hay that grows in fields’. It is a peculiar mix of a poem, apparent images from both the poet’s lived and literary experience, placed side by side. It is contentedly denotative, creating a sense of ease and oneness with the natural world. The movement of sunrise to sunset is perpetually peaceful, its colours oils for the young poet’s palette. The ruminative introspection which elevates Kavanagh’s ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, a poem which can be read in useful parallel to ‘Camas Road’, is not present. At the poem’s turn, as ‘Dark shadows fall o’er land so still’, Hartnett’s only thought and action are of flattened description, the creation of ‘this ode’.
‘Camas Road’ then, though essentially a curiosity which stands outside of Hartnett’s body of work, can be read as a seldom afforded snapshot of Michael Hartnett the poet before he became one. In contrast, his poem ‘A Small Farm’ shows a marked development in his poetic craft. Bridget Halpin, his grandmother, lived there with her son, Denis (Dinny Halpin), in what Hartnett describes as a prolonged state of ‘civil war’,
I was abandoned to their tragedies,
Minor but unhealing.
The word ‘abandoned’ here has many undertones and is important for the poet because he repeats the line twice in the poem. He has told us elsewhere that he was, in effect, ‘fostered out’ by his parents in Maiden Street, Newcastle West, to his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, from a young age and spent much of his childhood in her cottage in Camas. However, there is also the suggestion that while there he was ‘abandoned’ and somewhat neglected as he became an outsider, an unwilling observer of the ‘civil war’ of the household, as Bridget and her son Dinny constantly argued and fought over the minutiae of running a small farm in difficult times in the Ireland of the late 40s and early 50s.
Hartnett saw in his grandmother a remnant of a generation in crisis, still struggling with the precepts of Christianity and still familiar with the ancient beliefs and piseógs of the countryside. For Hartnett, there is also the added heartache that sees his grandmother struggling to come to terms with a lost language that has been cruelly taken from her. This, therefore, is a totally different place when compared to, for example, Kavanagh’s Inniskeen or Heaney’s Mossbawn or Montague’s Garvahey. However, there is an underlying paganism here that is absent from their work, although Montague comes close in his great poem, ‘Like Dolmens Round my Childhood, the Old People’.
For Hartnett, his grandmother represents a generation that lived a life dominated by myth, half-truth, some learning, and limited knowledge of the laws of physics, and therefore, as he points out in ‘Mrs Halpin and the Lightning’,
Her fear was not the simple fear of one
who does not know the source of thunder:
these were the ancient Irish gods
she had deserted for the sake of Christ.
However, Hartnett’s powers of observation and intuition were honed in Camas on Bridget Halpin’s small farm during his frequent visits. He tells us that he learnt much on that small farm during those lean years in the forties and early fifties,
All the perversions of the soul
I learnt on a small farm,
how to do the neighbours harm
by magic, how to hate.
The struggle to make a success and eke out a living was a constant struggle and burden. The begrudgery of neighbours, the ‘bitterness over boggy land’, and the ‘casual stealing of crops’ went side by side with ‘venomous card games’, ‘a little music’ and ‘a little peace in decrepit stables’. The similarities with Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ are everywhere, but Hartnett does not name this place; it is an Everyplace. The poem is simply titled, ‘A Small Farm’, so there is no Inniskeen, Drummeril, or Black Shanco here. Still, the harshness and brutality of existence, ‘the cracked calendars / of their lives’ in the 50s in Ireland, is given a universality even more disturbing than the picture we receive from Kavanagh. Yet, it is here in Camas that he first becomes aware of his calling as a poet and, like Kavanagh, it was here that ‘The first gay flight of my lyric / Got caught in a peasant’s prayer’. And so, to avoid the normal household squabbles of his grandmother and her son, he ‘abandons’ them, turns his back on them, and begins to notice the birds and the weeds and the grasses.
The depiction of another agricultural custom is shown in ‘Pigkilling’. The joyful detailing of the killing of a pig at his grandmother’s farm in Camas eschews any characterisation of Hartnett as a simplistically environmental poet, denouncing all human domination over nature. Rather, it depicts the killing as a vital part of the rural community’s relationship with animal-kind, comparable to ritual.
Like a knife cutting a knife
his last plea for life
echoes joyfully in Camas.
This is one of the few Camas Poems that names the place and the central figure of the poem himself uses the pig’s bladder as a plaything: ‘I kicked his golden bladder / in the air’ (Collected Poems 125). Agriculture here is not mechanised but depicted as an ongoing, sustainable facet of rural life: the poem echoes the loss of many of these old rituals and crafts of the past, as Heaney does in his collection, Death of a Naturalist.
The townland of Camas is also central to an episode that the poet recounts for us in his seminal poem, ‘A Farewell to English’ (Collected Poems 141). This encounter hovers somewhere between reality and dream, aisling (the Irish word for a vision) or epiphany. The incident takes place at Doody’s Cross as the poet walks out on a summer Sunday evening from Newcastle West to the cottage in Camas. He is on his way to meet up with his uncle, Dinny Halpin. He sits down ‘on a gentle bench of grass’ to rest his weary feet after his exertions, when he sees approaching him three spectral figures from the Bardic Gaelic past – Andrias Mac Craith, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, and Daíbhí Ó Bruadair. These ‘old men’ walked on ‘the summer road’ with
sugán belts and long black coats
with big ashplants and half-sacks
of rags and bacon on their backs.
They pose as a rather pathetic group, ‘hungry, snot-nosed, half-drunk’ and they give him a withering glance before they take their separate ways to Croom, Meentogues and Cahirmoyle, the locations of their patronage, ‘a thousand years of history / in their pockets’. Here, Hartnett is situating himself as their direct descendant and the inheritor of their craft, and the enormity of this epiphany occurs at Doody’s Cross in Camas: the enormity of the task that lies ahead also terrifies and haunts him.
Earlier in ‘For My Grandmother, Bridget Halpin’ (Collected Poems 52), he again alludes to the wildness, the paganism, the piseógs that surrounded him during his childhood in Camas. His grandmother’s worldview is almost feral. She looks to the landscape and the birds for information about the weather or impending events,
A bird’s hover,
seabird, blackbird, or bird of prey,
was rain, or death, or lost cattle.
This poorly educated woman reads the landscape and the skies as one would read a book,
The day’s warning, like red plovers
so etched and small the clouded sky,
was book to you, and true bible.
And yet, in his beautiful poem, ‘Bread’ (Collected Poems 53), he evokes and echoes the warmth and nurture of Mary Heaney’s kitchen in Mossbawn. His grandmother’s kitchen in Camas was a comforting place for him, and his early childhood memories are ones of coming home to roost,
and I come here
on tiring wings.
Odours of bread….
The picture we get of the small farm in Camas is rather etched out in generalisation and aphorism, and through the accordant clichés of petty hatred and ignorance, ‘how to do the neighbours harm / by magic, how to hate’, before Hartnett brings the glass into focus, employing idiosyncratic detail which establishes the world of the poem itself. As already mentioned, the cottage on this small farm was a Rambling House, a house where neighbours gathered to tell stories, play music and card games,
venomous card games
across swearing tables
His early poetry, then, creates a delicate balance between description and abstraction, the actual and the figurative. In this way, Hartnett’s particular subjectivity, his way of seeing, is established. In time, it would become his poetic currency. We are invited into the quintessentially old traditional Irish kitchen with its pictures of the Pope, the Sacred Heart, the statue of Our Lady, the Crucifix,
Here were rosary beads,
a bleeding face,
the glinting doors that did encase their cutler needs,
their plates, their knives, the cracked calendars of their lives
In this poem, therefore, Hartnett is following on from Kavanagh in shining a light into the domestic and interior life of rural dwellers not previously considered worthy of attention.
I have to mention one other poem, a quintessential Camas poem, which appears in the collection A Necklace of Wrens, published in 1987 after his return to Dublin. This is a collection of selected poems in Irish with English translations by Hartnett. The poem in question is titled ‘The Country Chapel’, with its Irish translation ‘An Séipéal faoin Tuath’. This memory poem describes the scene outside the country church on any given Sunday. The young, observant Hartnett describes the various characters who have come from the ‘fat meadows’ as ‘sly and happy’. They resemble ‘a set-dance team / by the wall of the old chapel’. They are all strategically placed depending on the various local rows and even their differing sporting and political allegiances, ‘foe avoiding enemy’. This eclectic group of neighbours are beautifully portrayed in the lovely Hartnett metaphor: ‘The congregation is a lonely horse’ who appear to be ‘as awkward as a man /dancing with a nun / on a wedding day’. This may well be a long-lost poetic portrait of the people of Killeedy, Ratheenagh, Ballagh and Kantoher in the mid-40s and 50s.
Bridget Halpin’s ‘small farm’ in Camas may have been small and full of rushes and wild iris, but it helped produce one of Ireland’s leading poets of any century. The influences absorbed in this rural setting, his powers of observation, his knowledge of wildlife and flowers, and his ecocentric bias, are impressive and are all-pervasive in these Camas Poems and, indeed, his poetry in general. Hartnett, the quintessential nature poet, would be delighted and impressed to see the magnificent new Killeedy Eco Park, which has been set up less than a mile from his ‘foster’ home in Camas by the combined efforts of that same local community in Killeedy. It is also significant that the visionary developers of this project have included a Poet’s Corner where Hartnett is remembered, just a stone’s throw from the small farm of his formative years. Here today’s generation in Camas and beyond can now come to ‘count the birds’ and the ‘nameless weeds’.
References
Hartnett, M. Collected Poems, edited by Peter Fallon, Gallery Press, 2001 (Reprinted 2012)
Hartnett, M. A Necklace of Wrens: Poems in Irish and English, The Gallery Press, 1987 (Reprinted 2015).
HARTNETT, M. A Book of Strays, edited by Peter Fallon, The Gallery Press, 2002, (Reprinted 2015).
Statue of a pensive Michael Hartnett in The Square, Newcastle West.
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