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Life
| c.1949- ; b. England (née le Marquand), of Jersey family; raised a Catholic; ed. Reading Univ. (Fine Art) - trained as painter; settled in Co. Louth with her husband, a farmer, 1962, with whom six children; later divorced and settled at Dartmouth Sq., Dublin; her poetry collections incl. Return Single [?], Now is a Moveable Feast (1991), performed on RTE, 1980; Behind the Sea (1993); Immortal Sins (1993); verse plays incl. Beds (Dublin Theatre Festival 1982), much as the title; also La Corbière (Dublin Theatre Festival 1990), on prostitutes callously drowned by the occupying German forces off Jersey; |
| guest writer at Kerry International Summer School, Aug. 1996, lecturing on the ‘suppression, ridicule, and opposition’ that women who want to write have faced (Clearing the Space: A Why of Writing, 1996); member of UCD Women’s Study Forum; three plays (La Corbière, Le Crapaud, Les Yeux), her “Jersey Lilies”, were performed at Beckett Centre, TCD, Sept. 1996; issued Nourishment (2005), poems of sex, love and desire; issued To Keep the Light Burning: Reflections in Times of Loss (2008), poetry collection. ATT |
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Works| Poetry |
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| Drama |
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| Prose (Criticism) |
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| Miscellaneous |
| num. reviews incl. ‘Slugs and the English’, review of books on Constance Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth by Anne Haverty and Gifford Lewis [resp.], in Books Ireland (Oct. 1989) |
| Anthologies |
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Criticism
Rebecca E. Wilson & Gillian Somerville-Arjat, [interviews] eds., Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1990), pp.201-07 [incls. poems, “Long Tongue”; “If”; p.129 [Heirloom’]; Dawn Duncan, ‘Compassionate Contact: When Irish Playwrights Reach Out For Others’, in Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, eds., Irish Studies in Brazil [Pesquisa e Crítica, 1] (Associação Editorial Humanitas 2006), pp.49-68 [infra]. See also James J McAuley, ‘Friar-poet of particulars’, review of Nourishment, [inter al.], in The Irish Times (3 Sept.2005) [infra].
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Commentary
James J McAuley, ‘Friar-poet of particulars’, review of Nourishment, [inter al.], in The Irish Times (3 Sept.2005), Weekend: ‘[...] From the first line of the second poem, we are immersed in a sequence of dramatic love-alogues. We find ourselves, like voyeurs, reeling precipitously through so many amorous moments that the lovers must have felt wearied by the time they reach The Weather Channel, Florida, 2001, where they move “into this, still carry between them / their own personal weather”. The sequence has formal and rhetorical flaws, but avid readers won’t be deterred. The poems achieve high marks for two of Milton’s criteria: only a C for “simple” in the Puritan sense, but A’s for “sensuous” and “passionate”.’
Dawn Duncan, ‘Compassionate Contact: When Irish Playwrights Reach Out For Others’, in Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, eds., Irish Studies in Brazil [Pesquisa e Crítica, 1] (Associação Editorial Humanitas 2006): ‘In Hartigan s La Corbière, sexist attitudes and actions taken by the male tools of empire are challenged in a chilling recreation of the carelessness of the men toward the women they force to sexually serve them. Most of the women die in a shipwreck that is imaginatively evoked through chanting and lamentation, through the crossed dialogue of soldiers and women. The soldiers who have over-run the homeland of these women and ripped them from their homes have no concern for their lives, shrugging aside the human loss [...] However, the women will not die easily or unremembered. In Hartigan’s hands and in the voice of the narrating survivor, these women call out to all other women who have been brutalised by men who march over their lands and over their bodies with the same disregard: “Rise up from the bottom of the sea. Rise up from the bottom of their minds. Rise. Up pushing down the sea. Rise. Shout out so loud that the world will burst. From the bottom of the sea the world will burst” (Hartigan, in Catherine Leeney, ed., Seen and Heard [... &c.], 2001, p.184).
The call for shouting, for disturbing the equilibrium and bringing to the surface the horrors that have been perpetrated, forcing the world to hear the voice of the oppressed is not only dramatically startling; it is also political activism. Hartigan’s choice of story is a significant political act in our world today: first, because sexual exploitation of the vulnerable is a hidden daily occurrence in a world with more permeable borders; and second, because wars waged on a large scale and with technological developments that allow killing without fully encountering the human other have reduced recognition of human loss to unnamed numbers of “collateral damage”, as the military term such losses.’ (pp.51-52.) Further, quotes Judith Butler on the violence against those who are not quite living which is ‘a mark that is no mark [with] no public act of grieving.’ (Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso 2004; here pp.53-54.)
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References
Included in anthologies - Ailbhe Smyth, ed., Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women’s Writing (Dublin: Attic Press 1989); Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares & Brendan Kennelly, eds., Ireland’s Women (Dublin: G&M 1994).
Cathy Leeney, ed., Seen and Heard: Six New Plays by Irish Women (Carysfort Press 2003), 338pp. - contains “La Corbiere”.
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