Poetry: Poets and scholars right a long-standing wrong by pouring light on the work of Michael Hartnett.
One night in Limerick a few years ago, two young lecturers from Mary Immaculate College sat up late drinking a bottle of wine and got to talking about the poet, Michael Hartnett (1941-1999), and wondering how it was that not only was there no book on Hartnett but that there was so little work being written on him. The wine and the lateness of the hour concentrated their minds and one asked the other: "Why don't you and I edit a book and call it Remembering Michael Hartnett?"
Not much more than two years later the book is in the shops and it contains a number of scintillating essays. One feels that the book is a labour of love as well as scholarship on the parts of the principal contributors and that this spirit of "efforts of affection", to borrow Marianne Moore's felicitous phrase, emanates from the two young editors, neither of whom knew Michael Hartnett when he was alive but who love the man as well as the work with a passion and an earthy mix of humility and scholarship.
John McDonagh lectures in the department of English at Mary Immaculate and Stephen Newman in the department of Irish and this duality gives their book its natural focus: Hartnett as a poet of the two languages, English and Irish. Each contributes an essay, McDonagh a thoughtful, considerate appreciation of Hartnett's 1988 volume, Poems to Younger Women, and Newman an equally thoughtful, considerate assessment of the posthumous A Book of Strays. McDonagh faces up to previously unmentionable poems such as Unfinished Novel. In addition, they coauthor a brief biography of Hartnett, which will be indispensable to new readers.
Seamus Heaney kicks off with a characteristically workmanlike introduction in which he not only reiterates his own high opinion of Hartnett but surveys the life's work.
When Declan Kiberd is flying at 18,000ft the journey is never less than interesting. But when, as here, he is flying at 36,000ft, he is a stunning pilot. Turning his back on the cockpit windscreen and putting the aircraft on auto, he addresses the flight crew, both hands speaking simultaneously. His The Double Vision of Michael Hartnett is an aphoristic tour de force: "Hartnett always liked his languages foreign, and non-respectable"; "For Hartnett poetry must always remain estranged, isolated, even alien."
Delicately, Kiberd reminds us that Hartnett's wife, Rosemary Grantley, like Yeats's wife George Hyde-Lees, was an Englishwoman. Not since WB Stanford's Enemies of Poetry (1980) has an Irish academic written so sensibly as well as sensitively on the nature of poetry: "This is one of art's ultimate challenges - how to ravish the ineffable in a language dense with precedents."
Louis de Paor contributes a brilliant essay on Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide's non- existent "collected poems in Irish". He cites the failure of Gallery Press to publish Hartnett adequately: the 2001 Collected Poems, he writes, "is a deeply flawed publication and an unreliable guide to the trajectory of the poet's development".
It is as refreshing as it is poignant to see a poet writing honestly and eloquently about a fellow poet. On Do Nuala: Foidhne (1984), de Paor writes that its language is "capable of a fierce clarity, in which the poet finds a hidden groove in the received patterns of Irish that fits with the patterns of his own scarified imagination".
Róisín Ní Ghairbhi's essay would have fired the cockles of Michael Hartnett's heart. A native of Newcastle West, the young lecturer in the University of Limerick writes piercingly, eruditely on the significance of the title of Hartnett's first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic (1978). Nothing would have more pleased Hartnett than that a fellow townswoman not yet born when he published Adharca Broic should now, 28 years later, publish a fiery, scholarly essay on that same beautifully conceived book. Authoritative and a superb researcher, she writes also on A Farewell to English, for which the immediate casus belli, she enlightens us, was a speech given to the Irish Association on February 22nd 1974 by one Charles McCarthy. She writes lyrically but groundedly on the influence of Pasternak on Hartnett and on their mutual preoccupation with the figure of the hortus conclusus.
The two angel Gabriels contribute sparky, down-to-earth ruminations: Fitzmaurice on Hartnett's sojourn in Templeglantine in the hills of west Co Limerick, and Rosenstock on Hartnett's early great, long poem, his version of the Tao. Fitzmaurice recalls many family visits to Templeglantine in the early 1980s "where Michael, Larousse Gastronomique to hand, would cook the most sumptuous meals". Rosenstock recalls visits to Upper Leeson Street in the late 1980s and the death-mask on the wall of the flat of the hands of the piper, Seamus Ennis - "Look at those long fingers, Gabriel".
ROSALEEN LISTON, ANOTHER daughter of Newcastle West, writes illuminatingly on Hartnett and Lorca. She applies Ian Gibson's words on Lorca to Hartnett: "Lorca inherited all the vigour of a speech that springs from the earth and expresses itself with extraordinary spontaneity." Hartnett had duende: his curse and his blessing.
As if all that were not enough, the poet's photographer son, Niall (born 1971), contributes a fond, quirky, sage foreword.
This book should have been published 30 years ago. But in 1976 the establishment scorned Hartnett. And yet - "One cobweb threading rain can civilise a race." (For my God-Daughter, B.A.H.)
My only quibbles with the editors of this fascinating book are: they have inexplicably allowed some erroneous biographical information to stand in Declan Collinge's Inchicore piece; the proof-reading is patchy; and they do not include a treatment of what I take to be one of Hartnett's masterpieces, Sibelius in Silence (1994). But fascinating it is: for its footnotes alone, this posthumous Festschrift is a must.
Paul Durcan is the Ireland Professor of Poetry. His 2006 Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture in Trinity College Dublin was entitled Hartnett's Farewell. His most recent collection, The Art of Life, was published by the Harvill Press in 2004
Remembering Michael Hartnett Edited by John McDonagh and Stephen Newman Four Courts Press, 176pp. €45