Francis Harvey, who has died aged 89, was a poet, playwright and fiction writer. Though born in Enniskillen in Fermanagh, Donegal was his natural home and he has some right to be considered the county's poet laureate.
This year a festschrift celebrating the man and his poetry was published by Professor Donna L Potts from Washington State University. His latest collection, Donegal Haiku, from Dedalus Press also came out and in September Lyric FM ran a wonderful hour-long piece on him by documentary-maker Eamon Little. It wasn't a bad year to bow out.
What you get in his work is Yeats’s “ordered passion”: calm, clear and hard-headed observations touched with style, love, mystery and at times a quiet humour. In very unsentimental fashion he wrote about the county, its landscape, its people, the birds, the flowers, the animals, the mountains, stones and rocks. But he also took in family, philosophy, and religion and a little politics and social commentary besides.
He lived through a time when Ireland was a puritanical, constraining country, which prompted him to fight the good fight with Catholicism and orthodoxy and faith – a deep struggle reflected in some of his poetry – yet he came out on the far side reconciled with belief, as if he and his Maker had battled to an honourable draw.
Mixed marriage
Francis Harvey was born in April 1925, the son of a Catholic mother from Donegal and a Presbyterian father from Enniskillen. The pair eloped. His father, Hamilton Harvey, a builder of bridges, houses and churches, died when Harvey was just six.
This prompted a move to Ballyshannon, where he came under the spell of the work of the town's famous poet William Allingham, as well as that of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost. Other influences were WH Auden, Edward Thomas, RS Thomas, WB Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, writers who helped shape the compelling lyricism of his work.
He and Agnes, his beloved wife of 59 years, were great friends of Brendan and Beatrice Behan. Donegal, Harvey said, was where Behan came to escape "the malice of cities". The pair of them and another writer, Patrick Boyle, earned a banner headline, "Playwrights' Midnight Party" in the Evening Press in the early 1960s when they were caught after hours in the Highlands Hotel in Glenties.
This was all very fine for Behan but not so good for Harvey and Boyle, respectively senior officials in the very disapproving Bank of Ireland in Glenties and Ulster Bank in Ardara. Harvey won the Irish Times/Yeats Summer School prize for poetry in 1977; the bank's refusal to permit him to attend the Sligo festival that year partly contributing to his decision to take early retirement in 1979.
Up to then he had enjoyed a degree of success as a playwright. His award-winning 1958 RTÉ radio play Farewell to Every White Cascade was broadcast throughout the world, while in the 1970s his play They feed Christians to Lions Here, Don't They? was produced at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin and in the US.
It was in the mid- to late 1970s that he decided to concentrate on poetry, 1978 seeing the publication of his first collection, In the Light on the Stones, from Gallery. There have been five more since then. He was elected to Aosdána four years ago. His poem "Heron" won the 1989 Guardian and World Wildlife Fund poetry competition when Ted Hughes was judge.
A fine reader
He was a fine reader of his poetry but did not allow for introduction or preamble, taking his style from the Welsh poet RS Thomas, whom he had heard reading in Galway.
“He just got up, took the poem out of his pocket, read it, and then put the poem back in his pocket, and said nothing else. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ I said to myself. Some poets when they read, they bring in a lot of extraneous stuff; they don’t confine themselves to the poem.”
His friend and fellow Donegal poet Moya Cannon said it was a “complete mystery” to her why his work was not better known, while also allowing that his own dogged reticence was a factor.
Harvey, however, always had confidence in his own literary standing: the work rather than the acclaim was what mattered.
He said he wrote to “get something out and to leave something behind” as his Presbyterian father did with those bridges and churches. Shortly before his death he said: “Sometimes a poet dies and he is forgotten for a hundred years and then suddenly there is a revival in his work – that happens.”
He is survived by his wife, Agnes, his five daughters – Attracta, Esther, Danea, Pauline and Joan – and the extended family, including many grandchildren.