Francis Harvey is launching a new poetry collection, and, although he is an octogenarian, he and his work are as vital and vibrant as ever, writes Gerry Moriarty.
Francis Harvey (82) is pulsing with a late-run inspirational surge. Tomorrow in the Damer Hall, at St Stephen's Green in Dublin, his Collected Poemsfrom Dedalus Press will be launched at a joint reading with the poet Gerard Smyth, whose new volume is also being published.
Harvey is primarily a lyric poet with a philosophical bent. Donegal, its people, its landscape, its light, its wildlife, its flowers, his metaphysical soul-searching, his family are what you'll find in his work, and much more besides.
Old friends are remembered too, in the book. One late night early in the 1960s, Harvey, Brendan Behan, and the writer Patrick Boyle, both dead now, were caught after hours in the Highlands Hotel, in Glenties. That earned them the front-page banner headline in the Evening Press, "Playwrights' midnight party".
This was when Harvey was first making his mark as a writer for his award-winning radio play, Farewell to Every White Cascade. At the time he was a senior official in the Bank of Ireland in Glenties. The publicity didn't help his career prospects.
He never made manager.
Not that it bothered him. Harvey's sights were on the higher ground. He stuck banking for another 15 years or more, ending up in Donegal Town where he now lives, but he "got the hell out" early when computerisation allied to de-personalisation took over in the mid- to late-1970s.
All the time he was writing short stories, plays and poems, before finally dedicating himself almost totally to poetry. His first collection, In the Light On the Stones, was published in 1978 by Gallery Press, with three more to follow, and now the Collected. "Writing is like dying: it's lonely and nobody else can do if for you," he says.
"Being a writer is a complex state," Harvey adds. "One is doing something one likes but at the same time one is constantly looking for reasons for not facing the blank page. Being alone in a room facing a blank wall and a blank page is one of the happiest states imaginable, when a poem is beginning to take shape. Otherwise, it's hell." As well as previous work, there are many new poems in the collection, all of them written in the past six years when his creativity was in spate. "It's a very mysterious business, creativity, but creativity also demands hard work," he says.
The Ballyshannon poet William Allingham was an early influence, his grandfather reciting pat his verse to the young Harvey in Ballyshannon, where he spent much of his youth. Wordsworth too. Other influences include WH Auden, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, RS Thomas, Patrick Kavanagh and WB Yeats.
I first met Harvey, Frank as he's generally known, in 1976, when I worked in Donegal Town. On a glorious April day, 31 years later, we're standing a few miles outside Donegal Town facing the Blue Stack Mountains, a range that is part of his inspirational mother lode; to our flank is Lough Eske, which also features regularly in his poetry.
It's an odd but privileged experience to be around a poem in the making, and I've been around more than a few with him. These were most often on these mountains in front of us or on other mountains in Donegal, or on its islands, Tory and Arranmore mainly, or sitting in a pub somewhere discussing or arguing about books, politics, faith, philosophy, sport, women or just life in general - the fact that we disagree about so much adding to the vitality of the conversation.
One fine morning in 1978, Harvey, Robert Bernen, the late American writer of Tales from the Blue Stacks, and I attempted to climb each of the Blue Stack peaks in one day. But for the fact we lost 90 minutes rescuing a sheep that was wedged in a sheugh, its anxious lamb standing nearby, we would have made it.
Instead, night falling, we abandoned the mission just short of our goal, walking down to the generous house of John Slevin at Edergole for tea and currant cake and to catch the last of the World Cup match between Scotland and Peru (it ended 3-1 for Peru). Some memories are vividly etched.
He'll take inspiration wherever it comes. Another old friend was the painter Lawson Burch, who died unexpectedly eight years ago, and who is remembered in a poem in the collection. Harvey likes solitude but he's convivial too. Nancy's pub in Ardara was a favourite haunt of theirs: Lawson cracking jokes, spinning tall tales; Harvey verbally sparring with his mate, enjoying the banter.
Nancy's had an old-fashioned outside gents toilet, where, as you stood and reflected on deeper things, you might also have noted the briar roses creeping in through the open window, providing sweet natural ventilation. Harvey, in the poem Nancy's, which is dedicated to another old friend, the pub's late owner Margaret McHugh, celebrated this eco-friendly form of air freshener, and how its special fragrance "brings a sort of drunkenness even to sobriety". The pity is Burch never got to illustrate the poem.
DONEGAL IS HARVEY'Sadopted county. He's a Fermanagh native, born in Enniskillen. His father was a Presbyterian who eloped with his mother, a Catholic. He's of the two traditions, therefore, and it's hardly surprising that, for this agnostic, religion and philosophy also feature in his work.
"I think it was Robert Frost who first said you can't worry a poem into existence. I suppose the same would apply to belief," he says. His poem, Getting Through, addresses this issue. He thinks Kierkegaard and Simone Weil had the measure of it: "God has to come to you as well as you coming to God."
He has strong views on literature and in particular believes that the academic world can suck the lifeblood of the poet. "I would like if the stranglehold of the academics could be broken." But what does that mean? "Well, for example, Patrick Kavanagh. I would imagine if he had gone to university he would have been a completely different poet.
"In poetry it's the concrete image that appeals to me most of all," he adds. "I try to avoid abstraction. It's entirely possible to achieve that effect. I try for clarity with mystery. Clarity on its own is not enough, you also need mystery; the reader must work a little as well." The readings tomorrow should be quite a night; for the general audience, obviously, but especially for his wife of almost 52 years, Agnes, his five daughters, grandchildren, extended family and his friends, although he'll find it rather difficult. He's a fine reader but dreads public occasions.
"Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity and I believe emotion is what keeps a poem alive," he says.
And love is the dominant emotion in his life. You can feel it and read it in this collection, perhaps most particularly in the poem Song At the End of Time, dedicated to his wife Agnes: "Let it never be said of me/as it was of others who sang/that they only sang of their love/when what they loved was dead . . . love is here for the woman/whose virtues I sing/The woman who is my wife."
Collected Poems by Francis Harvey (€28) andThe Mirror Tent (€11) by Gerard Smyth are published by Dedalus Press. Both poets will read from their new books in a Dedalus Press/Poetry Ireland reading in the Damer Hall, St Stephen's Green, tomorrow at 7pm.
