ABSTRACT
An Lia Nocht (1985) was the last Irish-language poem written and published by poet Michael Hartnett after he decided to forsake writing in English, undertaking a ten-year writing project in the Irish language. Despite the fact that An Lia Nocht was the second-longest (after An Phurgóid) and most ambitious poem that Hartnett wrote in Irish, he returned to writing in English shortly after its publication with Inchicore Haiku (1985) and did not publish any new original work in Irish thereafter.
This article proposes a close textual analysis of the long poem An Lia Nocht. Themes, literary techniques, imagery, and sound qualities of the poem will be discussed, and the different published versions of the poem explored. Issues around the perceived quality and reception of Hartnett’s Irish-language work will be addressed, and this poem in particular will be discussed as his ‘final statement’ on his poetic output in Irish. This article will make the case that Hartnett’s Irish-language output deserves further critical attention; and that the exploration of the theme of technology in An Lia Nocht is particularly noteworthy in the present day.
Please note
COMHARTaighde is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal in the field of Irish language and literature studies. The full text of the article described on this page is available in the Irish language only. English-language translations of article titles, abstracts and certain metadata are provided in order to enable international scholars to discover research published in COMHARTaighde and to facilitate the indexing of articles in certain academic databases.
