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.
The Irish are a people well-versed in tragedy, suffering, grief and sorrow. Beset by famine, poverty and colonization, the history of Ireland is one that is steeped in immense adversity and sadness. Perhaps this is why the Irish are so particularly adept at mourning the loss of a loved one and saying goodbye. This may explain Hartnett’s fascination with the unique customs and traditions surrounding the Irish Wake, a tradition which is one of the most distinctive and renowned funeral traditions worldwide. Needless to say, alcohol and music, both significant staples of Irish culture, are often heavily featured at a wake. While an Irish Wake is first and foremost a final farewell to the one departed, it can also serve as a potent and bracing reminder to those in attendance that they are still alive and a part of the world. This unique mixture of melancholy and mirth is partly why the Irish Wake is so famous the world over. Such an atmosphere is especially likely if the deceased was elderly or ill for a long period of time. Often the wake of a younger person or a child is a far more sombre affair.
Hartnett’s, Collected Poems, contain several ‘Wake Poems’, including, of course, a wake that he missed, that of his grandmother Bridget Halpin, whom he immortalised in Death of an Irishwoman. He was in Morocco at the time of her death in 1965. There is also his beautiful epitaph for John Kelly; In Memoriam Sheila Hackett, where he laments the passing of an early childhood friend; and reveries on the death of his young infant brother, For Edward Hartnett, ‘All the death room needs …’; and ‘How goes the night boy? …’, in which he plays a ten-year-old Fleance to his father’s Banquo, as they mourn the loss of his sister Patricia in 1951. Both Edward and Patricia died as very young infants, a not unusual occurrence in the late 40s, and early 50s.
At this time in Newcastle West there were over fifty public houses in the town and Maiden Street had its fair share such as Flanagans, McMahons, Cremins, Ahernes, Houghs, O’Gormans, and Flynns. However, custom and culture dictated that when there was a death, what was known as ‘The Corpse House’ became, in effect, another public house for the duration of the funeral obsequies. This explains why the young Hartnett had such ready access to the events surrounding the death of a neighbour in the close-knit community of the Coole and Lower Maiden Street. The death described here stands out because it seems that the young Hartnett arrives in time to witness the old man draw his last breath,
I watched the hand
until a finger moved
and veins above the index knuckle
pulsed.
That was his last movement.
The dead man’s wife is also described, and she comes across as being stoic and somewhat overwhelmed as she has been thrust into the limelight at this public event.
She had a band
of tan tobacco juice
upon her chin.
This poem, Maiden Street Wake, was written in 1968 and so, therefore, it is a memory poem, probably from the late 50s. The young Hartnett was present at this wake, and it may have awakened in him his near obsession with death and wakes and funerals that he revisited many times, especially for his friends in Maiden Street. This wake is reminiscent of the wake that is described so brilliantly in the first sequence of The Retreat of Ita Cagney. In the stage directions for an unpublished dramatic version/libretto of the same story, Hartnett describes the scene, obviously harking back to those wakes he had visited in his youth: ‘There is a sudden confused noise of prayer, glasses clinking, sneezes, melodeon music, a puff of smoke, sobs’. Later, the stage directions relate, ‘The other door opens: smoke, glass-noise, music, sneezes, sobs, rising and falling prayer-sounds’ and again ‘There is the sound of glasses tinkling, praying, sobbing, sneezing. The melodeon takes up the theme, and a puff of blue smoke comes from the doorway’.
Hartnett places this poem, Maiden Street Wake, alongside his poem Prisoners(both written in 1968) as the only two poems in a limited edition (250 copies) joint venture publication between Deerfield Press and Gallery Press that was published in 1977. Both poems are illustrated by Timothy Engelland and all copies are individually signed by the author. It seems that both poems were in his mind as he embarked on writing The Retreat of Ita Cagney / Cúlú Íde, the first major works, along with Farewell to English, undertaken on his return to West Limerick. Both poems celebrate their 50th Anniversary this year!
Maiden Street Wake may be an account of yet another random wake, one of the many wakes that the very young Hartnett witnessed and attended in Maiden Street during his childhood. Whatever the case may be, the old traditional Irish wake, with its old women keeners, flickering candles, music and drink, tobacco and snuff, as well as ‘soft biscuits and lemonade’ for the children, is used by Hartnett to set the scene for us in the poetic version of The Retreat of Ita Cagney. It is obvious that these events made a lasting impression on the young teenage Hartnett and those events fuelled his imagination and gave rise to some of his best poetry.
He describes the scene at ‘The Corpse House’, a mud-walled cabin in Lower Maiden Street. The dead man is laid out in his bedroom, surrounded by ‘women in shawls, and young children from the street in their ‘summer sandals’. His bed, ‘the breeding ground and cot’, is surrounded by ‘penny candles’ and people file by to pay their last respects. The family have made a great effort to cater for the influx of visitors and the best and ‘finest teacups’ have been brought out for the occasion. The poet uses a beautiful simile to describe the corpse, he is like ‘an alabaster Christ’ laid out in the tomb. For the young Hartnett viewing this traditional custom there is a sense of anticlimax at the end: after waiting their turn, they ‘shufffled round’ and were rewarded later in the meagre kitchen with ‘soft biscuits’ and a glass of the famous local soft drink, Nash’s red lemonade.
The Irish wake has long been the subject of poems, songs, films and stage plays. Hartnett has written several poems in which he explores the old custom in a very sympathetic way. These ‘Wake Poems’, his poems such as A Small Farm and the many poems written to honour his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, all attest to a poet exploring the past, its customs and traditions while seeking to enhance their value and importance lest they be lost.
‘Prisoners’ was a limited edition (250 signed copies) jointly published by Gallery Press, Oldcastle, County Meath and Deerfield Press, Massachusetts. Each copy was signed by the author. The edition consisted of two poems, Prisoners and Maiden Street Wake and was illustrated by Timothy Engelland. It was Hartnett’s last collection of poems in English, written before his collection ‘A Farewell To English’ (1975) but not printed until 1977.
This poem, Prisoners has largely been overlooked, but is of vital importance in the Hartnett canon. The poem, written in 1968, dates from his time spent working as a night telephonist in the Posts and Telegraphs Exchange in Exchequer Street, in Dublin. The poet visits and explores a theme close to his heart, which had bubbled to the surface again and which still sparked his interest on his return to his West Limerick base in 1975. Though it is other-worldly, reminiscent and redolent of a medieval setting, there is a close connection between Prisoners and the iconic The Retreat of Ita Cagney / Cúlú Íde. One poem anticipates the other, and both poems are inspired by events that had taken place in his beloved Maiden Street in or around 1958.
Another poem worthy of mention here is Maiden Street Wake. Hartnett’s Collected Poems contains several ‘Wake Poems’, including, of course, a wake that he missed, that of his grandmother Bridget Halpin immortalised in Death of an Irishwoman. His poem, Maiden Street Wake may be an account of yet another random wake, one of the many wakes that the very young Hartnett witnessed and attended in Maiden Street during his childhood. Whatever the case may be, the old traditional Irish wake, with its old women keeners, flickering candles, music and drink, tobacco and snuff, as well as ‘soft biscuits and lemonade’ for the children, is used by Hartnett to set the scene for us in the poetic version of The Retreat of Ita Cagney. This old traditional Irish wake is also constantly in the background throughout the dramatic version (in English) of the same story. It is obvious that these events made a lasting impression on the young teenage Hartnett and those events fuelled his imagination and gave rise to some of the best poetry he has written either in English or in Irish.
Prisoners explores the plight of a young, unnamed woman who is involved in a relationship with a married man, her ‘human Lord’. This arrangement is a source of local scandal and is frowned upon by society and the townspeople. In his Collected Poems, the poet places Prisoners immediately before The Retreat of Ita Cagney, where the same theme is revisited again, but where now the woman is given a name. The poet also published an Irish retelling of the story in the iconic Cúlu Íde. His papers in the National Library also contain fragments in Irish and English of the poet’s efforts to dramatise the story, efforts that eventually came to nought, but they are testament to his obsession with this story. It is interesting to note that in both Prisoners and The Retreat of Ita Cagney, the poet is sympathetic to the woman’s dilemma.
Whereas The Retreat of Ita Cagney has a sequence structure, Prisoners is a much shorter lyric. However, like The Retreat of Ita Cagney, it is a dramatic exploration of a woman’s loneliness and isolation in a callous and hostile society. The Retreat of Ita Cagney (in both its iterations in English and Irish), is undoubtedly Hartnett’s finest achievement. In Prisoners, and especially in The Retreat of Ita Cagney, as fellow Munster poet, Brendan Kennelly pointed out in his review of the latter poem, Hartnett, ‘pays relentless imaginative attention to this woman’s fate, and he presents with admirable dramatic balance her loneliness, independence and state of severed happiness’. In this condition, he states that ‘Ita Cagney becomes a visionary critic of the society that hounds and isolates her’ (Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 15, p. 26).
The Retreat of Ita Cagney is a pained celebration of an enforced privacy as experienced by the woman at the centre of the story; the title of this poem, Prisoners, paints her dilemma in an equally disturbing light. It opens with images of a self-imposed captivity. The man congratulates himself on being able to keep this ‘wild’ young woman, whom he obviously loves, ‘captive’ from the prying eyes of the town.
There are striking similarities between Sequence 2 in The Retreat of Ita Cagney and the way the poet proceeds to describe the woman who has been isolated and shunned by her neighbours in this poem. The images used follow the strict requirements of the Dánta Grá, and like Ita Cagney, the young woman here is described stylistically and is given classical features:
So her face was white as almond
pale as wax for lack of sunlight
blue skin by her eyes in etchings …
She is described here as waif-like and ghostly because she has not been seen outside – she is literally a prisoner in her own home or castle. Her classical features reveal the stresses and tensions of being ostracised by society, and her beauty is now of little consequence anymore because of her self-imposed house arrest.
In the later poem (1975), Hartnett also describes Ita Cagney in similar symbolic language. However, in contrast, Ita comes across as a strong and formidable woman: he describes Ita Cagney’s head from ‘her black hair’ to her throat, which ‘showed no signs of age’. Her hair is black save for a single rib of grey which stands out ‘like a steel filing on a forge floor’. He then describes her brow, her eyebrows, her eyes, ‘her long nose’, ‘her rose-edged nostrils’, her upper lip, her chin and jawline and finally her throat. The reason for this detail is, I think, to give us a sense of the formidable woman at the centre of this poem.
In Prisoners, the female protagonist is obviously loved and revered by her Lord, who arrives home, like a knight errant, a Gearóid Íarla*, on his trusty grey steed. The reason for the couple’s exclusion is hinted at here: she has abandoned the old gods and the old religion of the townspeople, and she now sings ‘to a new god, to the church of her invention’. It seems that she has abandoned organised religion and its laws, edicts and diktats in favour of a more private and personal one. However, this behaviour and lifestyle choice have led to strained relationships with friends and neighbours and have also led to her being seen as a ‘scarlet’ woman in the town. The only comparison between the old religion and the new is her scarlet dress, similar to the bishop’s garb from the old dispensation.
She has made her choice, and she and her partner have brought a son into this ‘secret world’. The poet then gives her a voice (if not yet a name):
… my Lord God is a human Lord,
not Lord of towns, but Lord of white horses, holy
of the hyacinth, the human Lord of light, of rain.
The word ‘Lord’ is repeated here eight times as in a monastic chant. She invokes the hyacinth, often associated with the sun god, Apollo, as a symbol of peace, commitment and beauty, but also of power and pride. The hyacinth is often found in Christian churches as a symbol of happiness and love. She cries out in anguish in the hope that the gods who ‘speak in rain of trees: send your holy fire to heat me’.
The woman and her partner at the centre of the poem have made their choices and are suffering because of the pressure being brought to bear on them. Their townhouse, towerhouse, keep now resembles a fortress, a prison, and those within, prisoners. Of necessity, the doors are bound ‘with iron chains’ and the besieged family are ‘locked safe inside an open moat of water’. The poet is hopeful that their struggle will succeed and, like his later masterpiece, The Retreat of Ita Cagney’, he is quietly proud of the woman’s heroic stand against the threatening and ominous forces that ranged against her. It is interesting to note that in Celtic mythology, the birch tree is associated with the goddess Brigid and symbolises new beginnings and protection. Their house is protected by birches, and the poet’s hope is emphasised by the beautiful final lyrical line:
The birch-hid dove was silk with peace.
There is one final echo of this poem, Prisoners, in the Irish version Cúlú Íde. In the final sequence (Section 9), Ita finds herself besieged in her ‘keep’ as neighbours move around outside ‘as venom breaks in strident fragments / on the slates’. She ‘hears the infantry of eyes advance’ and so she closely guards her child,
ag cosaint a saighdiúirín
ó uaill leaca an sraide
ó shúile dearga an yeos.
Her child, her ‘saighdiúirín’, her little soldier boy, must be protected from the dreaded yeomen, the hated symbol of the oppressor from a troubled colonial past.
Author’s Note:
* Gerald Fitzgerald, the third Earl of Desmond, known as Gearóid Íarla, was famous as a poet and wizard (1339 – 1398). He inherited his earldom, with its vast estates, in 1359. His castle in Newcastle West was one of his main strongholds, and he spent much of his time there. He successfully combined the Norman and the Gaelic Irish cultures, and he wrote his poetry in Irish. In 1398, it is said he mysteriously disappeared while walking in his Newcastle West demesne and was never seen again. Myth has it that he still lives under the enchanted waters of Lough Gur, in County Limerick, and that every seven years he and his hosts rise to the surface and ride their horses over the lake, and that, when the horse’s silver shoes wear out, he will be set free!
Works Cited
Hartnett, Michael. Collected Poems, ed. Peter Fallon. Gallery Books, Oldcastle, County Meath, 2001. Reprinted 2009 and 2012.
her own cloistered psalms, in her bishoped dress of scarlet.
For she built walls to keep God in,
and waiting there from eyes ahide
at night before her tearful face
at calm crossroads her child did raise,
her child into the secret world.
And she involved a secret Lord,
prayed the holy prayers she made herself,
and sang so: my Lord God is a human Lord,
not Lord of towns, but Lord of white horses, holy
of the hyacinth, the human Lord of light, of rain.
Yes, Lord of sacred anguish, hear
me, and speak in rain of trees: send
your holy fire to heat me. I
cry: my Lord of holy pain, hear.
House of slated roof was their house,
daylight knew no way to hound them out of peace:
the door was closed with iron chains
locked safe inside an open moat of water;
secret in their love they lived there:
the birch-hid dove was silk with peace.
– Michael Hartnett
This poem is vital in the Hartnett canon. The poem, which he wrote in 1968, visits and explores a theme close to Hartnett’s heart. It is later included as the title poem in his last collection in English before his now famous Farewell to English. This was a limited-edition (250 copies) joint venture publication between Deerfield Press and Gallery Press that was published in 1977. The publication includes two poems (Prisoners and Maiden Street Wake), and both poems are illustrated by Timothy Engelland.
This beautiful video has been produced by Danny Barry’s grandson, Dan Barry. The poem is narrated by the poet Michael Hartnett and it is taken from a radio documentary that he did in 1979 for RTE Radio entitled Poems Plain. The programme was produced by Donal Flanagan. The video contains copyrighted material that is being used for educational purposes under the doctrine of ‘fair use’. The use of this material is not intended to infringe upon the copyright owner’s rights. The material is used here solely for educational and non-commercial purposes. Dan Barry has suggested a small but necessary edit to verse four and the printed poem below reflects those changes.
Danny Barry’s poem, ‘The Christmas Tree’, deals with an actual happening. A few men from Maiden Street in Newcastle West decided to erect a Christmas tree in the street. They cut it down in Glenmageen, an area reputed to be haunted by a witch known as Sprid na Barna. Glenmageen is located about four miles south of Newcastle West and people can now visit the townland as they walk or cycle on the new Limerick Greenway. The stories of Sprid na Barna were well known, and the area near the present-day Barna Gardens was greatly feared by the local people. Indeed, it was said that only a few tough men would go home after dark along the road she haunted. Michael Hartnett is fulsome in his praise for the poet:
Danny Barry’s simple evocation of Sprid and her victims is extraordinary. Not because it is great poetry, but because he does not question the truth of the event at all. By the way, the Silver Dollar Saloon, which is a strange Hollywood, Western-type name, is a pub in Newcastle West, which was then run by the Flynn family, and is now run by the Kelly family.
The poem is purely mischievous and no insult should be taken by anyone, dead or alive, concerning the story told by the poet. Danny Barry is ‘ball hopping’ here and there are distinct similarities between this poem and many later written by Michael Hartnett, such as ‘The Balad of Salad Sunday’.
The Christmas Tree
A bunch of the boys from Maiden Street, one Wednesday afternoon,
Were drinking and awaiting in the Silver Dollar Saloon,
Waiting for a lorry to convey them to Glenmageen.
And they brought from there a Christmas tree, the finest ever seen.
They put it up in splendor, bedecked with fairy lights.
It was a wonderful tree, a beautiful tree, that lightened the darkest nights.
Now, the festive season passed away, but this Christmas tree was there to stay.
In time it became the talk of the town, for none of the boys dared take it down.
They were stricken with a malady the doctors could not say,
And there is one poor chap who now resides at the back of Shaw’s today.
Now, you have heard of Sprid na Barna, that very naughty dame,
That evil maid of Glenmageen, of the haunting ghostly fame.
The clergy had to banish her between the tree and the bark.
No more she would haunt and terrify the neighbours after dark.
Now the moral of this ditty I want you all to know
Twas a tree that grew in Glenmageen twenty years ago.
Now what I am trying to tell you will cause you all to frown
That the amadans from Maiden Street have brought auld sprig to town.
Now when the blackthorn blooms again and the sheepdogs howl at the full of moon
You could meet auld sprig with a glass of grog in the Silver Dollar Saloon.
Note: The reference to ‘auld sprig’ in the last line is a local mispronunciation of ‘sprid’
The original manuscript of the poem in Danny Barry’s own handwriting – you can see that it was a work in progress from all the crossing out!
Michael Hartnett in pensive mood by the River Arra in Newcastle West in the 1970s. Photo credit to Limerick Leader Photo Archives
I have been posting essays and commentary here over the years on the life and poetry of Michael Hartnett. The nature of my blog is a bit disjointed and doesn’t have a ready index, so I have decided to pull together all the Hartnett stuff in this one blog post. It’s a One-Stop-Shop for Hartnett fans. All you need to do – I think! – is Bookmark the post, and you can then browse at your leisure. You know the drill – just click on the link!
Believe it or not, Michael Hartnett is not the only poet to hail from Newcastle West! There have always been local balladeers and poets who have pandered to their local audience in the town and in the surrounding parishes. In Hartnett’s brilliant poem Maiden Street Ballad, he mentions two of these troubadours and he takes pride in saying that he intends to hold people to account ‘like Aherne and Barry before me’. He will, therefore, follow in the illustrious footsteps of Jack Aherne from Lower Maiden Street and Danny Barry who was born in Bothar Buí. He will be true to them and speak out like they had done in the generation before him. In the introductory verses of that famous ballad, Hartnett sets out his stall and warns us in advance of what we are to expect from him:
8
Now before you get settled, take a warning from me
for I’ll tell you some things that you won’t like to hear –
we were hungry and poor down in Lower Maiden Street,
a fact I will swear on the Bible.
There were shopkeepers then, quite safe and secure –
seven Masses a week and then shit on the poor;
ye know who I mean, of that I am sure,
and if they like they can sue me for libel.
9
They say you should never speak ill of the dead
but a poet must say what is inside his head;
let drapers and bottlers now tremble in dread:
they no longer can pay men slave wages.
Let hucksters and grocers and traders join in
for they all bear the guilt of a terrible sin:
they thought themselves better than their fellow men –
now the nettles grow thick on their gravestones.
10
So come all you employers, beware how you act
for a poet is never afraid of a fact:
your grasping and greed I will always attack
like Aherne and Barry before me.
My targets are only the mean and the proud
and the vandals who try to make dirt of this town,
if their fathers were policemen they’d still feel the clout
of a public exposure in poetry.
Danny Barry was born in Bothar Buí in 1911 and lived his whole life in Newcastle West. He married Margaret (Peig) Sayers from Ferriter’s Quarter, Dunquin, and together, they had four children: Breda, Mary, Kevin and Dennis. Danny worked as a summons server and pound keeper in Newcastle West. He was known to many as the “Sheriff” and to others as the “Bard of Bothar Buí”.
Danny Barry’s Warrant of Appointment as Summons Server issued by the Circuit Court Office on 15th August 1955
Michael Hartnett believed that Danny Barry of Newcastle West was an example of the local poet at his best. He lived most of his married life at 46 Assumpta Park, just round the corner from Hartnett’s childhood home. He died in 1973 while still in his early 60s. He is still remembered with a shudder by many of the people targeted by his verse. In praise of Danny’s poetry, Hartnett has said ‘he mocked the foolish, the vain, the craw thumper, the jack-in-office, and the bogus patriot’.
Danny’s son Kevin and Kevin’s sons, Dan and Graham Barry have done sterling work collecting the remnants of their grandfather’s poems in recent years. Remember these local poets did not publish their work or expect to have it dissected and analysed in academic circles. They never considered themselves as professional poets in the first place. Their songs and ballads were written for local consumption, to be recited in their homes, in local bars, in local ‘rambling houses’, or occasionally given a public performance in The Square. In a recently unearthed radio documentary entitled ‘Poems Plain’, broadcast by Radio Eireann in 1979 and produced at the time by Donal Flanagan, Michael Hartnett praises the work of these local balladeers and especially the work of Danny Barry:
They seldom publish their work. They write about local events. They’re firmly rooted in 19th-century verse forms. They don’t worry about identity, life, love, or any of the big themes that begin with capital letters. As a result, they’re not accepted by the arbiters of literary taste.
So, if these poets don’t write about the big mainstream issues, ‘life or love’, what do they write about? In the documentary, Hartnett tells his audience that they concentrate on local issues:
They commemorate hurling matches, football matches, disasters and they usually write badly when dealing with these themes. The ballads they produce are virtually interchangeable. Just a few names need to be changed here and there. But when they deal with humorous themes, or when they satirize, they can be brilliant.
In this, Hartnett suggests they form an unbroken line that stretches back into the Gaelic past, especially into the 18th century. The professional poets even then, such as Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, who was lucky and privileged enough to enjoy the patronage of the Fitzgerald family of Springfield Castle in Broadford, County Limerick, despised these local poets, ‘the sráid éigse, he called them, the street poets’.
Thankfully, due mainly to the intervention of Kevin Barry and his sons Dan and Graham and other members of the family much of his best work has been saved for posterity. Along with his other contemporary, the often notorious, Jack Aherne, only the more salubrious of their sound bites are still retained in people’s memories. Some of their surviving verses are still libelous, but as Hartnett says in the documentary, ‘the trouble with poetry is, no matter how vicious, how scandalous, how libelous, it becomes public property once distributed, whether by word of mouth or slipped under people’s doors early in the morning’. Hartnett, like Barry and Aherne before him, was wont to deliver verses to his neighbours in this manner on his return to Newcastle West in 1975, especially for those who had recently passed away. His Epitaph for John Kelly, Blacksmith, and In Memoriam Sheila Hackett are but two such examples of poems written following the death of a friend or neighbour.
Hartnett, who took no prisoners in his role as critic, dismisses some of Danny Barry’s work as weak and overly sentimental:
Like all Irish poets, he was in love with places, and his verses are full of place names. But these poems happen also to be his weakest poems. He fell heavily into an almost cloying sentimentality, made more syrupy by echoes from Robert Service and Thomas Moore.
Barry wrote about local places, Newcastle West, Glenastar, Glenmageen, Rooska Hill, the river Arra but Hartnett tells us that ‘his real strength lay in his satires, or in those poems in which he dealt with people’.
One such poem is The Old School in which he mentions two of the teachers, J.D. Musgrave and George Ambrose, who taught in the old Courtenay School. Master Musgrave was the principal of the school until his retirement in 1915. The poem was probably written around 1955 at the time when the old school was demolished to be replaced by the present building in Gortboy. There are slight echoes of Goldsmith’s The Village Schoolmaster here, but the poem is firmly rooted in the 18th century Anglo Irish ballad tradition, as in such songs as The Limerick Rake.
The Old School
Gone are the days when hearts were young and gay
Gone are the boys from the old school away
Gone are the monks the bright boys and the fool
Gone are the days of the old Courtenay School
If you wander back in memory to the days of long ago
When you were young and happy and worry you did not know
Ducking out to the back alley to play a game of ball
Or trying to jump the highest point of Boody Fitz’s wall
Or mooching in the Majors where the breeze was fresh and cool
And these are the happy memories of the old Courtenay School
Gone is J.D. Musgrave a gentleman was he
A student of prognosis he could tell what was to be
‘Twas often said he was severe he made them face the wall
But he was a man of progress he made scholars of them all
And there was Master Ambrose as George he was better known
For nicknames and for wisdom of superiors he had none
There was no one could afford to miss for he had an awful saying
You had better brush it up me boys cause you have sawdust for a brain
He christened many a pupil from his lofty rostrum stool
And no one knew his own name at the old Courtenay school.
So goodbye old school memories no more your rooms will ring
Of children’s happy voices and the happy songs they sing
My dear old school you are silent now ’cause they took your heart away
No more the tramp of children’s feet soon you will crumble and decay
But I will not forget you and the happy days of yore
Nor will the boys across the seas in far and foreign shore
Our boyhood terms our boyhood joys a lingering memory
That no time or age can yet blot out in our hearts you will always be
For there are many words when spoken cause a tear to dim their eye
But the saddest little word of all is the simple word Goodbye.
Here Danny Barry uses words and misuses words which only a master of verse in the 18th century could have done. He uses the lovely expression, “a student of prognosis” to describe Master Musgrave. Interestingly, his son, Maurice Musgrave later married Dolly McMahon who ran a public house where Gearoid Whelan now has his establishment. She is the Dolly Musgrave that Hartnett immortalises in Maiden Street Ballad:
‘twas in Dolly Musgrave’s I drank my first glass
As is obvious from the poem nicknames have always been synonymous with Newcastle West. Hartnett, himself, in Maiden Street Ballad, describes the many from the town who had to take the emigrant boat to England and elsewhere:
Off went Smuggy and Eye-Tie and Goose-Eye and Dol,
off went Ratty and Muddy and Squealer and Gull;
then the Bullock and Dando and Gallon were gone,
all looking for work among strangers.
The old men who stayed, time soon thinned their ranks –
like Gogga and Ganzie and Dildo and Sank,
and the Major and Bowler felt death’s icy hand;
old Maiden Street went to the graveyard.
Hartnett himself admitted that the list given in the verse above is only a small sample of the nicknames given to the natives of the town. The nickname ‘Smuggy’ is interesting – it’s from the Irish smugach, meaning ‘snotty’!
In his notes for that great ballad, Hartnett tells us that, ‘it used to be said that if a stranger walked from Forde’s Corner (now Bourke’s Corner at the top of Maiden Street) he’d have a nickname before he got to Leslie’s Ating House’ (where Richard (Dickie) Liston had his sweet shop). Also in an article written for The Irish Times on 11th November 1968 entitled ‘Poet’s Progress’, he declared that ‘in small towns in Ireland, unless a man has a nickname (a reputation, good or bad), he hardly exists at all’.
Hartnett himself was simply referred to as ‘The Poet’ and he gave his younger brother John the nickname ‘Wraneen’. In the Maiden Street Ballad, he refers to his brother Denis as ‘Dinny the Postman’. Dinny, who has sadly only recently passed away, was also often referred to as ‘Halpin’. In Danny Barry’s poem The Old School, George Ambrose is credited with giving each student a nickname and, Barry uses the poignant and telling phrase, ‘and no one knew his own name at the old Courtenay school’. I’m sure that this also applied to the teachers!
Hartnett informs us that Barry’s poem, The Christmas Tree, deals with an actual happening. A few men from Maiden Street in Newcastle West decided to erect a Christmas tree in the street. They cut it down in Glenmageen, an area reputed to be haunted by a witch known as Sprid na Barna. Glenmageen is located about four miles south of Newcastle West and people can now visit the townland as they walk or cycle on the new Limerick Greenway. The stories of Sprid na Barna were well known, and the area near the present-day Barna Gardens was greatly feared by the local people. Indeed, it was said that only a few tough men would go home after dark along the road she haunted. Again Hartnett is fulsome in his praise for the poet:
Danny Barry’s simple evocation of Sprid and her victims is extraordinary. Not because it is great poetry, but because he does not question the truth of the event at all. By the way, the Silver Dollar Saloon, which is a strange Hollywood, Western-type name, is a pub in Newcastle West, which was then run by the Flynn family, and is now run by the Kelly family.
The poem is called The Christmas Tree. Again I mention Robert Service, and it’s evident in the meter, even the introduction is pure Service.
The Christmas Tree
A bunch of the boys from Maiden Street, one Wednesday afternoon,
Were drinking and awaiting in the Silver Dollar Saloon,
Waiting for a lorry to convey them to Glenmageen.
And they brought from there a Christmas tree, the finest ever seen.
They put it up in splendour, bedecked with fairy lights.
It was a wonderful tree, a beautiful tree, that lightened the darkest night.
Now, the festive season passed away, but this Christmas tree was there to stay.
In time it became the talk of the town, for none of the boys dared take it down.
They were stricken with a malady the doctors could not say,
And there is one poor chap who now resides at the back of Shaw’s today.
Now, you have heard of Sprid na Barna, that very naughty dame,
That evil maid of Glenmageen, of the haunting ghostly fame.
The clergy had to banish her between the tree and the bark.
No more she would haunt and terrify the neighbours after dark.
Now the moral of this ditty I want you all to know
‘Twas a tree that grew in Glenmageen twenty years ago.
Now what I am trying to tell you will cause you all to frown
That the amadáns from Maiden Street have brought auld sprig* to town.
Now when the blackthorn blooms again and the sheepdogs howl at the full of moon
You could meet auld sprig with a glass of gin in the Silver Dollar Saloon.
*Sprid na Barna was sometimes mispronounced locally as Sprig na Barna
This beautiful video has been produced by Danny Barry’s grandson, Dan Barry. The poem is narrated by the poet Michael Hartnett and it is taken from a radio documentary that he did in 1979 for RTE Radio entitled Poems Plain. The programme was produced by Donal Flanagan. The video contains copyrighted material that is being used for educational purposes under the doctrine of ‘fair use’. The use of this material is not intended to infringe upon the copyright owner’s rights. The material is used here solely for educational and non-commercial purposes.
Danny Barry perhaps wrote a couple of hundred poems, many of them now lost or mouldering in the cupboards of his victims. A handful, between twenty and twenty-five, have been recovered due to the perseverance of Danny’s family, especially his daughter Mary Flanagan, and in recent times by his grandchildren Dan and Graham Barry.
Michael Hartnett believed that the best poem Danny Barry wrote, is a piece called The Eviction. Again, it is based on a natural happening. It is full of irony and humour, and of course, the elemental Irish hate for landlords, sheriffs, and bailiffs is very evident.
The Eviction
My name is Peter Shea, my age is fifty-seven.
The old Dock Road was my abode, a station next to heaven.
I was happy as an angel, with my lot I was content,
But I took the drinking porter, and I could not pay the rent.
So now to all good neighbours, a sad tale I must state.
I was forced to go from my bungalow, beside the Sandpit Gate.
Tom Hartnett was my landlord, and a damn bad one was he.
I only owed him six years’ rent when he kindly summoned me.
I tried to calm his temper, but I could not calm old Tom,
So to ease the situation, I took in sweet Maggie Nom.
Poor Maggie was so gentle and mild in her debate
That she won my heart and I lost my house beside the Sandpit Gate.
It was on a fine September morn, the year was thirty-one,
The sheriff came and flung me out, myself and Maggie Nom.
As he called to his head bailiff, ‘Is there any more to go?’
I said, wait a while your honour, sir, you forgot poor Maggie’s po.
And when he raised the lid off in candour I must state,
I smothered all the neighbours that live around the Sandpit Gate.
So now to finish up my rhyme, there’s one thing I must say
About the smiling face and the charming grace of my darling Gurky Shea.
For when the world frowned at me, she did not hesitate
With me to stay, and perhaps to lay, down by the Sandpit Gate.
Hartnett is effusive in his praise for this poem and as already stated he was by nature a very severe critic. His verdict here is glowing!
If you compare this poem, with the hundreds similar to it, which were written in Munster in the Irish language 200 years ago, it is easy to see the link between, say, Seán Ó Tuama and Danny Barry. The same love of place, of the cherished phrase, of galloping meters and tumbling rhyme, the same disregard for the very thin skins of the fool and of the oppressor, and amazingly enough, they had the same effect.
Danny Barry could frighten his enemies with a threat of public laughter, and yet he achieved what all poets try to achieve. Because of the earlier efforts of Danny Barry and Jack Aherne, Michael Hartnett was very conscious of his local audience, and when he returned to Newcastle West in the mid-70s he wrote many ribald verses for that audience culminating in the publication of Maiden Street Ballad in 1980. Like Hartnett, Danny Barry managed to ‘write a few songs for his people’, he was recognized by them as a poet, he could make his people laugh or sing or tremble, and he was well aware of the fragility of his own meagre attempts in verse. He says in one of his little poems, called Remembrance,
And so it will be when he is gone.
Someone will sing of him in song.
Someone will read what he held dear.
But too late for praise he will not hear.
References and Links:
“Poems Plain – Danny Barry” was a short radio documentary presented by Michael Hartnett on RTE radio in 1979 and produced by Donal Flanagan. All quotations in this article come from a transcript of the documentary. Listen to the full radio documentary by clicking on the link below
The author is indebted in particular to Dan Barry, grandson of Danny Barry, for invaluable background information in the preparation of this blog post. The Barry family has done amazing work in collecting the scattered remnants of their grandfather’s life’s work. They have done us all a great service.
Jack Aherne’s Supermarket in Lower Maiden Street. Jack was also a coal merchant and he also sold sand and gravel from the sandpit behind the store in what was known as Aherne’s Field – now the location for the Lidl Supermarket and the Scanglo factory. When Jack Aherne closed his supermarket the premises were bought by Tom Moran who carried on an electrical business on the site. Jack’s father, also Jack Aherne is the other noted bard and rhymer whom Hartnett refers to in Maiden Street Ballad – ‘like Aherne and Barry before me’. Photograph by Sean Kelly.
We are on the final countdown to the Éigse Michael Hartnett Festivalfor 2022! There is a wide-ranging programme of events between workshops, poetry readings, music, exhibitions, film, book launches, street entertainment, and even a bus tour!
We’ve had some events already with the young people in the town in the schools and the youth organisations. Colm Keegan has conducted workshops in creative writing in SMI and in Desmond College and the results of their labours will be on view during the Festival weekend.
Aileen Nix, a local artist, has been working with the local Foróige group in town to produce lanterns for the opening parade.
Edward O’Dwyer also worked with the Foróige group and their poems will be on display around town.
The idea of the Éigse is to recognise Michael Hartnett’s genius and to celebrate his life and his poetry. As you know he died in 1999 at the age of 58 and there has been an annual Éigse every year since – even during Covid we went online and kept it going.
This year we are proud to announce that thanks to the generosity of Limerick City and County Council we have been able to increase the value of the annual Michael Hartnett Poetry Award to €8,000 and we are delighted that Eleanor Hooker from Dromineer on the shores of Lough Derg is this year’s deserving winner of the prestigious award.
We received great news yesterday with the confirmation that the recently acquired portrait of Hartnett by Edward McGuire which is now in the City Gallery will be on display in Newcastle West for the opening of this year’s Éigse.
THURSDAY
We kick things off on Thursday the 6th of October at 7.00pm in the Square with a rousing street performance by The Hit Machine Drummers, a kilted brotherhood of rhythmic warriors who enthrall and entertain with dynamic, captivating drumming. They will lead us in a lantern parade with members of the Foroige Youth Club in Newcastle West. The parade will leave the Square and travel down Hartnett’s beloved Maiden Street to the Council Offices down near the Longcourt House Hotel. There this year’s Éigse will be officially opened by the Lord Mayor, Francis Foley who will present this year’s poetry prize to Eleanor Hooker. Other special guests on the night will be Gerard Stembridge and music from Brian Hartnett.
FRIDAY
On Friday the 7th we begin bright and early with a poetry reading by Eleanor Hooker which takes place upstairs in Marguerites at 11am.
This is followed by lunch with Mark Patrick Hederman former Abbott and Headmaster in Glenstal at 1.00pm at the Desmond Complex, where a light lunch will be served to accompany a reading from Dr. Hederman’s recently published works including Crimson and Gold: Life as a Limerick.
The evening events at the Longcourt House Hotel start at 6.00pm with a belated book launch that fell victim to Covid in 2020. Keith McCoy will be reading from his debut novel Hello Larry Barry and from his recently published second novel TheJude Crew. Both novels are set in Newcastle West although The Jude Crew spreads its wings a bit wider.
At 8pm in The Longcourt House Hotel, we have a fantastic poetry reading by two former Michael Hartnett award winners Kerry Hardie and Peter Sirr who were also our judges this year for the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. The reading will be followed by live music from cellist Núria Vizcaino Estrada from Barcelona and currently studying for her MA in Classical String Performance in UL.
Also on Friday at 8.00pm you can enjoy two film screenings over at the Desmond Complex in partnership with Newcastle West Film Club and Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Based on the novel Foster by Claire Keegan, An Cailín Ciúin, is the acclaimed award -winning Irish-language film that has broken all Irish box office records this year. This will be followed by Seanie Barron: Only in Askeaton, a short film that dips into the life and work of wood artist Seanie Barron and examples of his work will also be on exhibition at the Red Door Gallery throughout the weekend.
SATURDAY
Saturday the 8th begins at the Desmond Complex with the annual Michael Hartnett Memorial Lecture at 11am. This year the lecture is being given by Historian and former Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland, Caitriona Crowe. Caitriona will deliver the lecture on: How did Ireland do in its decade of centenaries? So, the lecture should be very thought-provoking and I’m looking forward to that.
This will be followed at 1.30pm by music and memories of Hartnett from uilleann piper and former RTE producer Peter Browne. He has some great stories to tell about being on tour with Michael Hartnett back in the 80s.
We are particularly happy this year to be taking the Festival outside NCW in partnership with the Kileedy Development Association and to acknowledge the wonderful work and community building going on in Raheenagh. So, at 3 p.m. the Hartnett Bus Tour will depart from the Desmond Complex taking in Camas, home of Michael Hartnett’s grandmother Bridget Halpin, whom he immortalised in his beautiful poem ‘Death of an Irishwoman’. Then it’s on to the Poet’s Corner at Killeedy Eco-Park and finishing with tea and tunes at the Tigh Cheoil in Ashford.
Saturday evening’s events will begin with a reading from author Mary Costello at 8.00pm at the Longcourt House. She will be reading from her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), and her two novels Academy Street (2014), and The River Capture (2019) which was shortlisted for many awards.
The reading will be followed by live music from Mick Hanly who needs no introduction to Limerick audiences. He is one of our foremost singer/songwriters, and of course, Mick was born and reared in Limerick. We expect a big crowd in The Longcourt House Hotel next Saturday night.
SUNDAY
Salad Sunday is a new addition to the Éigse Michael Hartnett programme for 2022 and celebrates one of Michael Hartnett’s most amusing poems, The Balad of Salad Sunday, which pokes fun at an incident in Newcastle West back in the early 80s.
Salad Sunday is intended as a fun, entertaining event for the community and will take place in the Square, the Red Door Gallery, and the Desmond Complex. Seamus Hennessy will be the MC for the events in the Square and there should be plenty of buskers and food stalls – so come along and enjoy the craic – hopefully, the weather holds up!!
Our final two events of the weekend are the launch of two new books: Gabriel Fitzmaurice is launching the new edition of Farewell to Poetry and Tom Moloney is launching his first collection of short stories called Overcoming the Joy and Other Yearnings. Both take place at 1.00pm and 1.30pm respectively at the Desmond Complex.
As you can see it’s a full programme with something for everyone young and old, so we hope you can join us over the weekend.
Many of the events are free but some need to be booked on Eventbrite although money will also be taken at the door. Check out our website http://www.eigsemichaelhartnett.ie for up-to-date details of all the events.
Éigse committee 2022: Vicki Nash, Norma Prendeville, Rachel Lenihan, John Cussen, Rose Liston, Rossa McMahon, Mary Carroll, and Vincent Hanley
All the perversions of the soul I learnt on a small farm. How to do the neighbours harm by magic, how to hate. I was abandoned to their tragedies, minor but unhealing: bitterness over boggy land, casual stealing of crops, venomous cardgames across swearing tables, a little music on the road, a little peace in decrepit stables. Here were rosarybeads, a bleeding face, the glinting doors that did encase their cutler needs, their plates, their knives, the cracked calendars of their lives.
I was abandoned to their tragedies and began to count the birds, to deduct secrets in the kitchen cold and to avoid among my nameless weeds the civil war of that household.
Taken from Collected Poems 2001, Gallery Press – (Collection reprinted 2009)
The ‘small farm’ referred to in this poem is that of his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, formerly Bridget Roche. According to parish records in Abbeyfeale, she married Michael Halpin from Camas, near Newcastle West, in Abbeyfeale Church on February 28th 1911 in what was, by all accounts, ‘a made match’ between both families and she then came to live in Camas where the Halpins owned a small farm of ten acres three roods and 13 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!’. Hartnett claimed that he spent much of his early childhood in Bridget Halpin’s cottage in the rural townland of Camas four 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 is 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.
In subsequent years, Michael Halpin and his wife Bridget had six children, Josie, Mary, Peg, Denis, Bridget (later to be Michael Hartnett’s mother) and Ita. Unfortunately, Michael Halpin died in September 1920 at the age of 44 approx. having succumbed to pneumonia. In a heartbreaking twist of fate, his daughter Ita was born seven months later on 23rd March 1921. Bridget Halpin was now left with the care of her six young children and their ailing grandmother, Johanna. Johanna Halpin (née Browne) died in Camus on 18th June 1921 aged 80 years of age.
Bridget Halpin’s plight was now stark and the harshness of her existence is often alluded to in her grandson’s poems which feature her. The cottage which was little more than a three-roomed thatched mud cabin built of stone and yellow mud collapsed around 1926. The whole family were taken in, in an extraordinary gesture of neighbourliness, by their neighbour Con Kiely until a new cottage was built a short distance away. The family moved into their new home in 1931 and this is the structure that still stands today. According to Michael Hartnett this cottage, and especially the mud cabin which preceded it, was renowned as a ‘Rambling House’, a cottage steeped in history, music, song, dance, cardplaying and storytelling. Hartnett would have us believe that it was from the loft in this cottage that he began to pick up his first words of Irish from his grandmother and her cronies as they gathered to play cards or tell tall tales. (A more detailed genealogy of the Halpin family and the early formative influences on Michael Hartnett can be read here).
The poem ‘A Small Farm’, the first poem of the Collected Poems (2001), creates a delicate balance between description and abstraction. Students of Hartnett’s poetry should consider studying this poem as one of a series of poems that he wrote celebrating his grandmother, Bridget Halpin and the townland of Camas where she lived. The most obvious of these poems is ‘Death of an Irishwoman’ which he wrote on the passing of his grandmother in 1965. Others include, ‘For My Grandmother Bridget Halpin’, and ‘Mrs Halpin and the Lightning’. Abstractions, clichés, their representation through language, metaphors and the moment where these are drawn into focus, made specific and immediate, are central to these poems. ‘A Small Farm’ is a natural development and shows a more mature, confident and surer treatment of this place than the earlier ‘Camas Road’.
‘Camas Road’, Michael Hartnett’s first published work, appeared in the Limerick Weekly Echo on the 18th of June 1955. He was thirteen. The poem describes in particular detail 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 introspective 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 curio 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. It is well recorded and documented, especially by Hartnett himself, that he spent much of his childhood in his grandmother’s smallholding of ‘ten acres three roods and 13 perches’ in rural Camas about four miles outside Newcastle West and about one mile from the now vibrant village of Raheenagh. 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 in 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. However, there is underlying paganism here that is absent from Kavanagh’s work.
For Hartnett, his grandmother represents a generation who 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 cardgames’, ‘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 but the harshness and brutality of existence, ‘the cracked calendars / of their lives’ in the fifties 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,
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.
In this 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 about him. The attentive intellect that ‘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 human society which he can describe, yet does not identify with.
Later in, “For My Grandmother, Bridget Halpin”, 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.
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’, 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. 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, his ecocentric bias, are impressive and are all-pervasive in his poetry. Without prejudice, it also has to be said that he demonstrates a deeper knowledge of all local flora and fauna than could be reasonably expected of a ‘townie’ from Maiden Street or Assumpta Park!
Indeed, Hartnett, the quintessential nature poet, would be delighted to see the magnificent new recently developed Kileedy Eco Park which has been set up less than a mile from his ‘foster’ home in Camas by the combined efforts of the local community in Kileedy. 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 can now come to ‘count the birds’ and the ‘nameless weeds’.
Éigse 2022 visited the Eco Park in Raheenagh as part of the Hartnett Bus Tour. They were given a great welcome to the park by Jack O’Connor. The photo was taken at the Poet’s Corner. Photo by Dermot Lynch
References
Hanley, Don. ‘The Ecocentric Element in Michael Hartnett’s Poetry: Referentiality, Authenticity, Place’, MA in Irish Writing and Film, UCC, 2016.
Hartnett, Michael. Collected Poems, editor Peter Fallon, Gallery Books, 2001. Reprinted 2009 and 2012.
Hartnett, Michael. A Book of Strays, editor Peter Fallon, Gallery Books, 2002. Reprinted 2015.
The author would also like to acknowledge the voluminous background information received from Joe Dore, Michael Hartnett’s first cousin and inheritor of Bridget Halpin’s ‘small farm’ of ten acres three roods and thirteen perches.
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