Resolving his Poetic Crisis: Michael Hartnett's Ritualistic Divorce from An Spéirbhean an examination of Michael Hartnett's extraordinary poem A Falling Out, where he casts aside the Muse Goddess in order to move forward in the poetry of his final years.
The poem under examination is taken from his 1992 collection, The Killing of Dreams, in which Hartnett found himself facing his last years, questioning the foundation of his own poetics but having nothing in his armoury except poetry itself. His answer to his own dilemma was to enter into combat with poetry and the cultural concepts that up until then had sustained him. This essay will examine that moment of crisis and his profound and heretical strategy for moving through it. It will look especially at the poem "A Falling Out", and its ritualistic deployment of old magic, but will also consider the wider context of the collection that contained it.
John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and works within the Aisling poetic tradition, spanning vision poetry, contemporary fabulism, and surrealism. He is the author of seven poetry collections, including Futures Pass, Visions at Templeglantine, and The Nothingness Kit. His chapbook Inverted Night was published by SurVision in 2019, with his most recent chapbook, Doctor Eel's Thinking Machine, coming out from Bone Machine (USA) in late 2025. A recipient of a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship, he has won the Listowel Poetry Prize and been nominated for the Hennessy Literary Award.
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