You are here: Homepage > Remembering Michael Hartnett > Michael Hartnett 1941 - 1999

Michael Hartnett 1941-1999

Oh my darlings, oh my dears,
I have lived for fifty years;
and my hair is a river of tears —
oh my darlings, oh my dears.
- ‘For All the Children’,

A Book of Strays, The Gallery Press 2002

Michael Hartnett was born on 18 September 1941 in the regional hospital at Croom, County Limerick. By the time of his death at the age of fifty-eight in 1999 he had created a significant body of work, including a dozen books from The Gallery Press alone, some published posthumously. He was a scholarly man of wide reading whose literary achievement involved shape-shifting between English and Irish — two very different languages in historical collision — in addition to a rich harvest of translation, mainly from Irish, but also from Spanish, Chinese, German and Latin.

Michael was one of the six children (two dying young) of Denis and Bridie Hartnett. The family lived in Newcastle West but the circumstantial detail of nativity in Croom mattered to Michael as an earnest of literary Munster authenticity. Croom had been home to an eighteenth-century ‘Court’ of Gaelic verse and poets such as Seán Ó Tuama and Aindrias Mac Craith. Significant also was his fostering at the age of three by his grandmother Bridget Halpin, in the townland of Camas near Newcastle West. This was an intimate encounter with a living presence from an older world.

From his corner of the loft in his grandmother’s cottage the young boy would eavesdrop on the old woman conversing in Irish with her cronies. She foretold his future as a poet when a fledged nestful of wrens alighted on him one day — thus ultimately inspiring the poem ‘An Muince Dreoilíní / A Necklace of Wrens’. Later still, Bridget Halpin (‘who never came to terms with the twentieth century’) would be lovingly immortalised in ‘Death of An Irishwoman’.

Michael Hartnett’s family background was hardly conventional or conformist, given its contemporary Irish context of economic depression and a repressive church and state conservatism. The original family home in Maiden Street had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Michael’s father Denis Hartnett was a well-read house painter of radical inclination at a highly conformist time. “He was a socialist with Taoist leanings — though to say this is to talk with hindsight; like all poets, I can foretell the past…” (interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, published in Poetry Ireland Review, autumn 1987).

Michael had a decent secondary education and the ground-level culture of working-class communities in small Munster towns such as Newcastle West was more various and vibrant than might have been supposed: it was a happily indiscriminate allsorts of residual native tradition and mass-media infiltration.

That tolerant cultural embrace would stay with Michael. He avoided prescriptive agendas or ideologies, though he did adopt what looked to be one when he announced in 1975 that he would henceforth write only in Irish. By then, with the encouragement of John Jordan, he had spent a year at University College, Dublin. He had published his early work to considerable acclaim, lived for a time in Madrid and London and in 1966 married English-born Rosemary Grantley. They had two children, Lara and Niall.

A Farewell to English (The Gallery Press 1975; enlarged edition, 1978) initiated controversy as well as admiration. The rhetorical mode was part of the Gaelic tradition, though the title poem risked self-indulgent dramatics in angry reaction to the troubled and hysterical political atmosphere then current. It was as though Michael Hartnett was in reality pumping up the pressure to convince himself, even though his decision meant the voluntary laying aside of a large part of his own linguistic gift.

His brave integrity of commitment to writing in Irish in fact suited his need at the time, allowing sustained focus on the Irish language while he lived frugally with the family in a country cottage in Templeglantine. The wonderful collection Adharca Broic (The Gallery Press, 1978) was the first flowering, followed by further substantial work in Irish, first published by Coiscéim (An Phurgóid, 1982; An Lia Nocht, 1985).

Michael Hartnett’s Irish language peers acknowledge his stature and are amongst his most astutely informed commentators. Translation remained a major part of his creative gift, a unique ability to couple tradition with modernity. At heart he was perhaps a classically Irish mix of tidal faith and fatalism — intuitively in touch with a deeply buried Mediterranean impulse in the Irish psyche and native language, but one historically and climatically done down by the fateful alliance of puritan incursions from the east and constant troughs of low pressure from the west…

His marriage breakdown, the painful move alone to Dublin in 1984 and the return to writing in English resulted in the amazing collection Inchichore Haiku (1985):

My English dam bursts
and out stroll all my bastards.
Irish shakes its head.

In the same year his major work of translation, Ó Bruadair, appeared, followed in 1987 by the bilingual A Necklace of Wrens. In 1988 Poems to Younger Women was published on which Michael commented: ‘If the poems suffer from being sentimental, romantic or vicious, it is because I am no longer afraid of these emotions. In the main they were written out of love’.

For the last fourteen years of his life he had the love and support of partner Angela Liston. Alcoholism increasingly took a heavy toll, but Michael never lacked a remarkable diversity of friends and acquaintances. He was a meticulous man of small physical stature —a member of the Tuatha De Danann class, the magical arts branch,— but possessed of a compelling mix of magnetism and frailty, shyness and daring that affected people everywhere. With Michael, even a stroll to the supermarket could become an unpredictable adventure.

Significant work was still to appear before his death (and afterwards), including the volumes of translation, Haicéad (1993) and Ó Rathaille (1999), in addition to New and Selected Poems (1995). Necklace of Wrens was filmed as a documentary by Pat Collins and screened in 1999.

In late September of the same year, though in poor health, Michael was invited to return to the Clifden Community Arts Festival by Brendan Flynn, longstanding friend and supporter of artists and performers. When Brendan telephoned early one morning with the invitation, Michael explained that he had been up all night — translating Catullus. On the morning of the 23rd of September he met the assembled staff and students of Clifden Community School and read two of his best-loved poems: ‘Dán Do Lara’, for his daughter, and ‘Death of An Irishwoman’, for his remembered grandmother. It was to be his last reading. Three weeks later he was dead.

As with all true poets, a mysterious potency of verbal enchantment was at the core of his gift. Seamus Heaney recognised him as “one of the truest, most tested and most beloved voices in twentieth-century Irish poetry.”  He is remembered with love.

- Michael Coady

member of Aosdána

Michael Hartnett’s Poems are published by The Gallery Press

www.gallerypress.com

Festival News

Sign Up

to the Éigse Michael Hartnett mailing list