Selected New Poems | Michael Hartnett [Paperback]

This volume reveals a crucial body of work in Irish poetry, previously unavailable in North America. Beginning with a number of his precocious lyrics, written in Hartnett’s teens, the volume continues through exquisite love poems and early elegies, some pastoral poems and, later, farewells to pastoral. Hartnett’s celebrated declaration to write in Irish introduces a series of translations and announces the more public arguments of subsequent poems in English. The book concludes with five extended parables about salvation and the artistic life. It is undeniable evidence of a singular dedication and achievement.Michael Hartnett was born in Limerick in 1941 and was profoundly influenced by his Irish-speaking grandmother. Selected and New Poems is the best introduction to his poetry, containing work that spans his career from the 1960s until his death in 1999. Hartnett was a member of Aosdána and received multiple awards, including a Poetry Ireland Choice award, the Irish Poetry Prize, the American Ireland Fund award, and the Irish-American Cultural Institute award.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.”