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Nourishment Poems by ANNE LE MARQUAND HARTIGAN
Nourishment celebrates the feasts, and mourns the fasts, of deep sexual love. Essential nourishment indeed: for this is what it is to be fully human, to rejoice in the radiant dance of one's body with another's, and to sing soul unto soul. Anne Hartigan's work has always been acutely tuned to the sacredness of the sensual. Her rhythms spring from the page, re-inventing themselves with echoes of chants and prayers and charms. These poems reinvent and rewrite the erotic before our eyes, and 'rinse and wring the ear' with their rare emotional intelligence and compassion. Catherine Byron
In Nourishment Hartigan explores the possibilities of love, sex and desire. The age-old association of food and sexuality is inscribed with the sacred connotations of a "holy sin", a private ritual that encompasses physical and emotional healing as well as the creative possibilities of words rooted in bodily experience. Love is both constructed by the social and unquestionably ruled by the needs of the individual. Hartigan's poems accomplish the difficult task of writing about love without ever falling prey to sentimentality. At times purely physical, at times deeply in love, her voice contributes to the dismantling of old-fashioned conceptions of female sexuality. These poems are a treat for the senses and present Anne Hartigan as undoubtedly one of the most talented voices in contemporary Irish poetry. Luz Mar González Arias, Universidad de Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
Anne Le Marquand Hartigan is an award winning poet, playwright, and artist. This is her fifth collection of poetry. Her many awards include the Open Poetry Award from Listowel Writers' Week, The Mobil Playwriting Award for her play The Secret Game, and awards for her visual art. Her poetry has been translated and included in anthologies worldwide and Anne has enjoyed the experience of reading her poetry internationally. She performed La Corbiere at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, as a solo work in 1996. Of her five full length plays, Beds and La Corbiere were premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival. Her work has been performed in the USA, New Zealand, Lebanon, and at the Edinburgh Festival. Her wide ranging work includes radio, a silent mime, prose, and her recent humorous poetry for children.
Nourishment
Because I have lain on your deep Africa Gorse light and dusty cinnamon, burnt umbers You drank deep of my waters north and south, Arising dripping, a dark god. Knowledge of interiors. How simple to exchange continents, to play so easily A classic music.
Child's play, intricate and private, allowing love space To move in. A sacred grove, rowan, ash, laurel To cast and shed spells. This enchantment is as natural As the moon. This is the first touch. Shock: your unknown Face, skin. I roam in ochres, duns, siennas, gifts Spread before me on the white cloth. This is the necessary Air and water, the bread my mouth waters for, it can go on.
Review by James J. McAuley, The Irish Times, Saturday 3rd September, 2005
Anne Le Marquand Hartigan begins with an invitation-poem: "Here, take this/scatter of poems before you..." Is the reader addressed? No, the ironic last line -- "The full abandon" -- reassures us we're not literally included.
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".
