Poetry – Reviews Rants and Rambles

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Vincent Hanley · 1 Comment

Muince Dreolíní/A Necklace of Wrens by Michael Hartnett

Analysis

The Irish (and probably original) version of this poem first appeared in Adharca Broic (1978), Hartnett’s first collection in Irish. Thirteen poems from this collection later appeared in the 1987 collection A Necklace of Wrens, along with English versions/translations by the poet himself. Both collections were published by the Gallery Press.

This is probably one of the very few poems in which a poet pinpoints the epiphany moment when he knew he would be a poet. It is a memory poem, an early childhood memory from his time spent with his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, on her small farm in Camas, situated near the village of Raheenagh in the parish of Kileedy in West Limerick. In a poignant documentary made by Pat Collins shortly before the poet’s untimely passing, he says that when he told Bridget Halpin the story of the wrens, she replied, ‘Aha, you’re going to be a poet’.

The language is simple and childlike, and it is one of several poems that feature his grandmother and her influence on the very young Hartnett. We know that Hartnett spent some time with Bridget Halpin and her son, Dinny, his uncle, in the early 1940s, the war years, during what we Irish euphemistically called ‘the Emergency’, and before he started school in Newcastle West.

This poem (and its English translation by the poet himself) should be read alongside other memory poems featuring Camas, such as A Small Farm and the iconic Death of an Irishwoman. Indeed, if we come to this poem by reading it in the 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens, we begin to notice the nuances, the subtle whispers, which the poet reveals to us through his mastery of two languages. The original version, in Irish, was written while he lived in Glendarragh, Templeglantine, in the mid-seventies. The English version/translation was produced for the 1987 collection, ten years later, and like the wrens in the title poem, here Hartnett’s words ‘re-alight’ into English. He does not merely translate his poems; he refashions them again.

The memorable woodcut by Michael Kane on the book jacket of A Necklace of Wrens depicts a circle of six stylised wrens in profile. The disconcerting symmetry and packed sharpness of the images prepare us for the poem’s mysterious paradox. We need to remember that the poet wrote the poem in his mid-thirties, describing a memory of an event that took place when he was four or five years old. Do not be fooled by the simplicity of the poem – in two languages! The poet subtly suggests multiple layers of meaning. For example, the image of the ‘muince’, or torc in Irish and Viking culture, or the canque used in China and other Asian societies, is quite ambivalent. A necklace can be a decoration, a fashionable ornament, but throughout history some societies have also used it as a method of torture and subjugation, of punishment and humiliation. Down through history, to the present day, we come across very extreme examples such as the garrote used during the Spanish Inquisition or the very brutal necklacing used in South Africa by the ANC in the 70s and 80s.

The simplicity of the storyline and its brevity are astonishing. The poet is embarking on a new road, a brave adventure. This is one of his early efforts to write in Irish, and the results are astonishing. The story has a childlike simplicity. The Irish version uses classic fairy-tale elements such as ‘fadó, fadó’, or ‘Once upon a time’. The English version is more prosaic: a young child walking in the meadow finds a wren’s nest. The fairy-tale motif soon fades, however, and this story does not have a happy ending. At the poem’s end, the poet is left with ‘scars not healed yet’. The Irish version simply expresses wonderment that the young wrens could not feel the beating of the poet’s heart. The English version doubles down on this inference, referring not only to the sensory world but to the poet’s internal emotions: the very feeling that inspires the poetic utterance is denied to the wrens, thus privileging human subjectivity. One could claim that both versions of the poem begin with a lie. He tells us he ‘found a nest’, ‘d’aimsíos nead’. In fact, the young, mischievous, inquisitive Hartnett finds and disturbs the wren’s nest, and the fledged chicks and their mother explode from the nest in full survival mode.

The verse structure in both versions of the poem is very similar. The end-line rhyme is very controlled in the Irish version: ‘Fadó/fásta’, ‘nead/scread’. The English version is not as tightly controlled, apart from ‘young/young’ in stanza one. The loss of its rhyming scheme in the English translation adds to its plaintiveness. The language in both the Irish and English versions is spare, countering any tendency towards disbelief. Each compact quatrain is clipped and regular, made to resemble the birds it describes. The poet has returned to writing in English after his ten-year sojourn in West Limerick ends, and he shows his craft in subtle ways: ‘fully fledged’.

The verb ‘re-alighted’ in stanza two suggests that the birds settled around his neck and shoulders in the same formation in which they’d perched in the nest. It hints at another meaning of ‘alight’ – to alight upon something, to discover it suddenly. ‘Feather necklet’ beautifully encapsulates the near-weightless delicacy of the tiny birds. The poem points to Hartnett’s ecocentric credentials as a nature poet. Nature, in the form of the young wrens, has bestowed the gift; he has been anointed and ordained. And ‘the craft’ is further qualified: it’s the craft ‘which demands respect’. So the poet places himself, and the poet to whom he dedicated the poem, Mícheál Ó Ciarmhaic, as direct inheritors of the bardic tradition. Hartnett fully accepts the weight of responsibility this anointing brings: his anointing as a poet will entail a public role and accountability.

‘That was when the craft came’ implies that the wren’s gift was the gift of poetry. The poem is dedicated to Mícheál Ó Ciarmhaic (Michael Kirby), who was a fellow poet, painter, farmer, and fisherman from Ballinskelligs, County Kerry. Ó Ciarmhaic spent most of his life working the land and sea on the Iveragh Peninsula, looking out on Skellig Michael. He didn’t begin publishing his literary work until late in life, releasing his first book, Cliathán na Sceilge, in 1984 at the age of 78. When Hartnett returned to West Limerick in 1975, after announcing his intention to bid farewell to English and focus instead on the Irish language, he began a process of total immersion in Irish. One of his favourite places was the Ballinskelligs Gaeltacht (or what was left of it). There, Mícheál Ó Ciarmhaic, Mícheál Ó Siochrú, and others who understood what Hartnett was undertaking welcomed, befriended, and mentored him. Unlike Hartnett, who died at the age of 58 on the 13th October 1999, Ó Ciarmhaic passed away in April 2005 at the ripe old age of 98.

The wren (like Hartnett himself) is diminutive but has a huge voice; it combines vulnerability and power. It figures importantly as the traitor-bird in Irish folklore and is still persecuted in a yearly ritual by the ‘wranboys’ on St. Stephen’s Day. The ‘wranboys’ journey from house to house in rural Ireland, singing, ‘The wren, the wren, the king of all birds’. They sing and play music, expecting money to ‘bury the wren’. The word’s etymology also suggests that the wren is the druid-bird in Irish folklore, and that, for Hartnett, is its deeper symbolism.

The ‘sharp wonder’ felt earlier connects later to the quality of the clinging talons. A sometimes overdone and cliched idea of ‘the suffering poet’ gains a naturalistic thrust from this metaphor. The talons of the gift are sharp and cut deep. But we see no blood, hear no cries: we are simply told about the unhealed scars. The tone is bereft of self-pity. It is the craft that ‘demands respect’ – not the side-effect, the scarring. However, those who knew Hartnett in Newcastle West, in Glendarragh, and later in Inchicore will vouch for his tortured psyche. He did suffer for his ‘craft’; marital breakdown, family turmoil, dislocation, and alcoholism being the public ones we know of.

The acclaimed documentary by Pat Collins, also aptly named A Necklace of Wrens (1999), ends with a very poignant, philosophical reverie by the then-ailing Hartnett as to whether he considered his ‘craft‘ 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.

‘Muince Dreolíní’/‘A Necklace of Wrens’ sees Hartnett create an origin myth which relates to his beginnings as a poet. The Irish version begins with the phrase ‘fadó, fadó’, traditionally used to recount an old myth or legend, prefiguring the fantastic details that follow. Hartnett situates his poetic birth at a moment of immediate interaction between man and the natural world. The poem is redolent of ritual as the natural world confers upon the poet a sacrament which makes real the ‘gift of poetry’. The sacrament is not one of communion, however. This interaction with nature leaves Hartnett damaged; the ecocentric space wherein the poet realises his poetic self is marked not by affirmation but by solemnity and a counting of the cost of this transgressive experience:

That was when the craft came

which demands respect.

Their talons left on me

Scars not healed yet.

**********

Hartnett’s just reward came six years after this beautiful poem was first published in Adharca Broic (1978). Because of his dedication to his ‘craft’ and his growing reputation, along with the critical acclaim surrounding his bilingual poetry and historical translations of the works of Ó Bruadair, Ó Rathaille and Haicéad in the mid-80s, Michael Hartnett was elected and co-opted by his peers as a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s prestigious academy of artists, in 1984.

Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, and other Irish poets showing solidarity with the Dunnes Stores workers and also protesting the recent killing of South African Anti-Apartheid poet, Benjamin Moloise, on 18th October 1985.

References:

Collins, Pat. (Director). (1999). A Necklace of Wrens [Film]. Harvest Films.

Hartnett, Michael. Adharca Broic, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, County Meath, 1978

Hartnett, Michael. A Necklace of Wrens, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, County Meath. 1987.

Hartnett, Michael, Collected Poems, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, County Meath, 2001. (A Small Farm, p. 15, Death of an Irishwoman, p. 139).

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Vincent Hanley · 1 Comment

Free Resources for Leaving Cert English Poetry 2027

I have been posting English notes on my blog, Reviews Rants and Rambles, since I retired as an English teacher and an Advising Examiner for English Higher Level. I have brought all those links together here in one post or blog – an Index of all the posts I’ve written that are relevant to Leaving Cert English Poetry 2027. Bookmark this to save you the trouble of constantly searching the internet each time you want to do some background work on a particular poet or author. It’s imperfect and won’t suit every student, class, or teacher, but it’s my version of a ‘Pop-Up-One-Stop-Shop’, and you know the drill: just click on the link if it’s relevant to your studies! My choice of poets is personal, and you will easily see where my preferences lie by looking at the number of links provided for each text or poet!

However, Caveat Emptor! Leaving Cert Student Beware !! Use these resources wisely. They are my personal responses to the various texts, and you should read and consider them and decide to study them if you find them useful.

IN OTHER WORDS, MAKE YOUR OWN OF THEM, ADD TO THEM, OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.

You know the drill: Click on the link below

Elizabeth Bishop

Themes and Issues in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop: The Poet’s Poet

Related posts you might like (if you have time to spare!):

Roosters by Elizabeth Bishop; A poem whose time has come again?

Commentary on Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop

Analysis of Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour

Some sample essays (There may be some repetition)

A sense of loss pervades much of Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry; Discuss

Patrick Kavanagh is a very Religious Poet; Discuss

Patrick Kavanagh’s Poetry is full of Honesty, Integrity and Simplicity; Discuss

Patrick Kavanagh is a poet of the Ordinary; Discuss

Related posts you might like (If you have some time to spare!)

Stony Grey Soil by Patrick Kavanagh

An Introduction to Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh

Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon; An Overview

Adrienne Rich

Exploring the Poetry of Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012)

Hidden Riches in The Poetry of Adrienne Rich

William Butler Yeats

Study Notes on the Poetry of W.B. Yeats

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats: A Poem for Our Time

YEATS, A POET OF OPPOSING TENSIONS.

Posted on December 15, 2025December 15, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

Life’s Simple Pleasures

My wildflower COVID garden.

I like to spend my lazy days in the garden. When Kate and I set up home in Knockaderry in 1979, we inherited a garden and a red setter called Kelly. Then there was the recently acquired three-quarters of an acre, which was a very overgrown, forbidding blank canvas. The previous owners had made some effort and had put in a new bed of floribunda roses – the variety was Peace. There were other older roses there also, from previous owners, right back to Miss Airey, the original owner of the house. Miss Airey was a teacher in the old national school in Ahalin, and she built the house in 1935 and lived there with her companion, Mrs Sheehy. There were two or three Queen Elizabeth roses holding pride of place, which had been planted in 1952 to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s coronation that year. They were still hale and hearty when we arrived in September 1979, and they are still going strong today!

Kelly helped us settle in. He was a beautiful Red Setter who had come all the way from Scarborough with the previous owners, the O’ Rourkes. He slept in the back bedroom, and he ruled the roost. Each afternoon, he escorted the school kids to the bend in the road on their way home from school, at a time when school kids still walked to school. One evening, Frank Moore called to fix our phone, and he rang the doorbell to discover that both Kate and I were still at work. Kelly soon discovered the intruder, and he came and sat in his sitting position, strategically blocking Frank’s escape. He emitted the odd low growl until we arrived home at five o’clock, and Frank was glad to be released from his captivity. Until recently, and especially when Mary and Don were young and still at home, we always had a dog. We had numerous red setters, Susie the Old English Sheepdog, a Lassie-type collie, a Cocker Spaniel named Robbie (Fowler), and a Golden Retriever from hell called Oatie!

However, to be brutally honest, when we took up residence, the garden, like the house, was somewhat of a shambles! I remember distinctly going into the Bank of Ireland branch in Newcastle West in April 1979 to cash my monthly pay cheque, which you had to do in those days. The assistant manager of the bank, Eamonn Mellett, called me over for a chat, and during the conversation, he casually asked me if I was still interested in buying ‘that house out in Knockaderry’! I told him that I was, and he said that if that was the case, the bank would be willing to provide a mortgage for the property. Believe me, that’s how business was done in those days!

Huge amounts of time, effort and study went into planning and developing our garden. I knew that I needed to study up on shrubs, especially roses, or they would surely die! Fair to say I researched the topic to Master’s degree level! I had many favourite textbooks, but my favourites were: The Wisely Book of Gardening published by The Royal Horticultural Society, Be Your Own Rose Expert by Dr D.G. Hessayon, The Gardener’s Book of Hardy Herbaceous Plants by Wendy Carlile, and A Garden for All Seasons published by The Reader’s Digest. Having done all this research, however, long before Google took hold, I finally realised that, unlike many other less finicky shrubs and plants, it’s almost impossible to kill a rose!

There are two great advantages of having gardening as a hobby – it is great therapy and a very humbling experience. Despite the optimistic messages in the glossy magazines, not everything grows, and one always has to take into account that fourth dimension, the fact that some shrubs and trees grow too big, too fast. Today, I look back in wonder at the improvements made over the years and the huge changes that have occurred on our once overgrown and neglected piece of land over the past forty-five years. I have a photo somewhere of a tiny birch sapling that my daughter Mary brought home from school when she was in First Class, and today that birch proudly dominates our driveway in Kiltanna. This is one of the advantages of gardening: we plant seeds and shrubs and trees knowing that another generation will shelter under their magnificent branches in years to come.

Mary’s sapling birch has grown to dominate the driveway in Kiltanna

The second therapeutic value of gardening is especially useful for those who like to be in control of things. Work and relationships may seem at times to be hopelessly beyond our control, but our garden can give us a semblance of control over this small patch of the universe. We can mow and clip and prune and spray and fertilise to our heart’s content and imagine that we are at least the masters of all we survey if we so wish. All is right with the world within the neat borders of our own Eden. This thought has largely been responsible for me maintaining my sanity over the years!

During the COVID pandemic in 2020, I undertook a fairly big project, and between the 9th of May and the 9th of August that year, I constructed a fire pit in the already existing scree garden up the back. I had great help because Don was working from home at the time.

May is my favourite month in the garden. For others, May is a month spoiled by exams and the crippling anxieties associated with school and college, but for me, retired like Charles Lamb of old, I stroll leisurely about – not to and from – admiring my newly budded beech trees, the grasses, the weeds, the purple Aubretia, and marvel, as Thomas Hardy does in his poem, Afterwards:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

“He was a man who used to notice such things”?

I think it was George Bernard Shaw who wisely said that ‘the best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there’. Indeed, working in a garden brings us close to creation itself – it is an instrument of grace. Earlier, I mentioned that a man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. I consider myself blessed to have sat in the shade of many such trees, including the few surviving Knockaderry oaks on Quilty’s Hill, because someone planted those trees a long, long time ago.

Finally, time spent in the garden is never wasted. Wisdom is given to those who meditate in the garden; the wisdom to realise that no two gardens are the same, and thankfully, no two days are the same in any garden. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, we quickly realise that we shouldn’t judge each day by the harvest we reap but by the seeds that we sow.

The house and garden in Kiltanna, resplendent with the red Dublin Bay climbers. ‘You can’t kill a rose’!

Posted on November 26, 2025December 24, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

Some Glendarragh Poems of Michael Hartnett: Poems from the Hearth

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.

Doodles with Dad – the joys of being a poet with young children!

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

Dán do Niall, 7, le Michéal Ó hAirtnéide

Dán do Niall, 7

Mo thrua nach mairfidh tú go deo

i dtír na nead, Tír na nÓg,

tír mhíorúiltí faoi chlocha

tír sheangán:

tír na dtaibhsí dearga, tír fholláin.

Mas, tá an saol ag feitheamh leat

le foighne sionnaigh ag faire cearc:

cearca bana d’aigne úire –

scata fiáin

ag scríobadh go sonasach i bpáirc.

Más é an grá captain do chroí

bíse teann ach fós bí caoin:

ainmhí álainn é an sionnach rua

ach tá fiacla aige atá gan trua.

Seachain é, ach ná goin:

bí sonasach ach bí righin.

Beadsa ann d’ainneoin an bháis,

mar labhraíonn dúch is labrraíonn pár:

Beidh me ann in am an bhróin,

in am an phósta, am an cheoil:

Beidh mé ann is tú i d’fhear óg –

ólfad pórtar leatsa fós.

Poem for Niall, 7

A pity you’ll not always be

In Bird-Nest country, Tír na nÓg,

land of miracles under stones,

red-phantom land, a safe place.

For world waits for you,

patient fox watching hens:

white chicks of your fresh mind –

a white flock

scratching in a happy field.

If love commands your heart

Temper strength with gentleness:

A lovely dog the red fox is

but his teeth are pitiless.

Avoid him, do not harm him:

be happy but be tough.

I will be there in spite of death

for ink speaks and paper speaks:

I will be there in the sorrowful times

When music plays at wedding feast.

I will be there as you grow older –

And some day I’ll buy you porter!

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.

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

Dán do Rosemary le Michéal Ó hAirtnéide

Dán do Rosemary

As an saol lofa seo

gabhaim leat leithscéal:

as an easpa airgid atá

ár siorsheilg thar pháirc

ár bpósta mar Fhionn

gan trua gan chion

ag bagairt ar do shacs-chroí bog ceannúil.

Gabhaim leat leithscéal

as an teach cloch-chlaonta

as fallaí de chré is de dheora déanta –

do dheora boga:

an chlog leat ag cogarnach

ag insint bréag,

an teallach ag titim as a chéile.

Téim chugat ar mo leithscéal féin:

m’anam tuathalach, m’aigne i gcéin,

an aois i ngar dom, le dán i ngleic,

i mo gheocach sa tabhairne ag ól is ag reic.

Thréig mé an Béarla

ach leatsa níor thug me cúl:

caithfidh mé mo cheird

a ghearradh as coill úr:

mar tá mo gharrán Béarla

cran-nochta seasc:

ach tá súil agam go bhfuil

lá do shonais ag teacht.

Cuirfidh mé síoda do mhianta ort lá.

Aimseoimid beirt ár Meiriceá.

Poem for Rosemary

For this miserable life

I apologise:

for our lack of money

scrimping and scraping,

our marriage like Fionn’s

pitiless, loveless,

affecting your soft fragile heart.

I apologise

for our run-down house,

its clay walls, tear stained –

with your soft tears:

the clock is ticking

telling you lies,

the place is falling apart.

I go to you with my apology:

blundering, tactless, clueless,

with a poem in my fist,

and I always acting the yob in the pub.

I abandoned English

but I never turned my back on you:

I now must relearn my craft

from fresh woodland:

because my English copse

is leafless and bare:

but I remain hopeful

that your days of happiness are near.

Your worth will be appreciated yet.

I hope we both reach our America.

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.

Posted on November 2, 2025April 30, 2026 by Vincent Hanley

The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin by Michael Hartnett

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 17^th and 18^th 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-Catholic Penal 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 wasn’t just his great wit or romance or his rapacious conviviality that earned such prominence and permanence for Eoghan Rua. The fact that he was a legend in his own lifetime is not without good reason. His fellow parishioner, Jesuit scholar and lexicographer, An tAthar Patrick S. Ó Duinín in his Beatha Eoghan Ruaidh Uí Shúilleabháin wrote of him:

Never perhaps did a poet attain such undoubted celebrity without the aid of printed or written copies … He was the poet of his country and her people. Though an alien tyranny despised and crushed them, her people were to Eoghan the true children of the Gael, the true heirs to the soil in which they now toiled as slaves … Whether in a jovial or a serious mood, or in the midst of his carouse, he never for one moment forgot his mission, which was an eternal protest against the tyranny of the English and a kindling of the minds of the people into courage and hope. He described their sufferings and wrongs with such pathos that young and old wept as they heard them sung.

So, there is much to admire in this short poem by Hartnett. 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).

Hartnett, Michael. Adharca Broic, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1978.

Hartnett, Michael. A Necklace of Wrens: Poems in Irish and English, editor Peter Fallon, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1987.

Hartnett, Michael. Poems to Younger Women, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1988.

Michael Hartnett in pensive mood by the River Arra in Newcastle West in the 1970s. Photo credit to Limerick Leader Photo Archives

Posted on October 21, 2025October 22, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

Michael Hartnett’s Legacy

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.

Posted on October 6, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

Paula Meehan’s ‘Letter to Michael Hartnett’

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, 2^nd 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 1^st 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.

information sourced from Wikipedia

Posted on September 22, 2025September 22, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

The Camas Poems of Michael Hartnett

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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However, Caveat Emptor! Leaving Cert Student Beware !! Use these resources wisely. They are my personal responses to the various texts, and you should read and consider them and decide to study them if you find them useful.

IN OTHER WORDS, MAKE YOUR OWN OF THEM, ADD TO THEM, OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.

Elizabeth Bishop

Emily Dickinson

John Donne

Patrick Kavanagh

Derek Mahon

Adrienne Rich

William Butler Yeats

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Dán do Niall, 7

Poem for Niall, 7

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Dán do Rosemary

Poem for Rosemary

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The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin

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About the Author

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References

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