Wake Forest University Press

"One of the truest, most tested and beloved voices in Irish poetry in our time." Seamus Heaney

Michael Hartnett was born in Limerick in 1941 and died in Dublin in 1999. His Selected and New Poems is the best introduction to his poetry, containing work that spans his entire career.

Of his celebrated 1975 announcement that he would henceforth write in Irish, scholar Tom O'Grady wrote: "At once an iconoclast and a throwback, Hartnett aspired to realize the not-quite-paradox of both breaking with convention and embracing tradition."

Hartnett eventually changed his mind, but kept true to two lines from A Farewell to English:

The act of poetry
Is a rebel act.

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 cardgame 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.

Selected Poems