The young disabled poet Davoren Hanna, who was born 50 years ago on March 12th, touched many people during his short life. Fellow poet Brendan Kennelly, who did much to promote Hanna’s poetry, described him as a “gifting, cunning, resourceful and often ruthless poet who, with a disabled body, had to do justice in language to the turbulence and wonder within him”.
He was born in Dublin, the only child of Jack Hanna and Brighid Woods. His father was a philosophy graduate who worked as a receptionist with Telecom Éireann for a decade before becoming a freelance journalist and subeditor with the Irish Press, and his mother was a schoolteacher.
Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at six months, it took some time before it was realised that he had a particularly severe form of the condition, quadriplegic spastic cerebral palsy, made worse by epilepsy. With no control over his movements, he was confined to a wheelchair, had difficulty eating and could not speak.
He was assessed as having learning difficulties at the age of two but his parents refused to accept this and his mother taught him to read and write by having him on her lap and holding his constantly moving fist as it pointed at letters on a metallic board. As Antonia Logue wrote in this paper (October 9th, 1996), his parents “soon realised that however severe their son’s physical handicap, mentally his intelligence was enormous”.
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In mid-1983, at the age of eight, he was transferred to a typewriter and produced his first poem. “Writing was a laborious process and required great empathy from his helper, who had often to guess which word he was trying to spell. This, together with the precocity of his thought and diction, led certain assessors to doubt that his poems were unaided works and not guided by his mother,” according to Bridget Hourican, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
But his talent was soon recognised and awards followed. His poem, Utter Tranquillity, won first prize in the Irish Schools’ Creative Writing Awards in 1985; the next year he received a British Spastics Society’s national literary award; he won a further prize at the Cúirt International Poetry Festival in 1987, and the same year the Christy Brown Award sponsored by Dublin Corporation.
In 1987, he moved from the Central Remedial Clinic to St Patrick’s National School in Drumcondra and then on to Pobalscoil Rosmini secondary school. An appearance on RTÉ 1’s Kenny Live show led to a government bequest fund which helped his parents provide the full-time carer he needed.
“His enormous charm and affectionate nature, together with his bouts of intense, rapturous energy and what the poet Brendan Kennelly called his ‘rascally sense of humour’, captivated those he came in contact with, from schoolfriends to other writers to his stream of mostly female helpers,” according to Bridget Hourican.
Not Common Speech, a short poetry collection, was published in March 1990 and in September that year, RTÉ broadcast a documentary on him, Poised for Flight, narrated by Daniel Day-Lewis. Also that year he received the Rehabilitation Institute’s People of the Year Award and was 98FM’s Dubliner of the Month in November, but tragedy struck when his mother died suddenly from a heart attack brought on by her diabetes.
The final years of his life involved increased suffering and frequent hospitalisations. He died from a heart attack on July 18th, 1994, a few months after his 19th birthday, and was buried in Fingal cemetery.
Bridget Hourican offered some valuable insights into his poetry. As young as eight, he could write such a mature phrase as “vacant as cadavers, cavernous we lie” and she believed that “at its best, his is a taut, graceful, witty, distinctive voice”. A line such as “the damned-up seas of resonance shall take the arid earth by storm” reflects his sense of physical entrapment in contrast to his soaring spirit.
Although there is some bitterness, and a strong sense of affinity with the oppressed, she thought his poetry mainly affirmative, especially his sense of wonderment with the world that he sees as God’s creation, which reminds one of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
His father published a moving memoir, The Friendship Tree, in 1996. It is a warm tribute to his wife and son. Jack Hanna is quoted as follows in The Irish Times article mentioned above: “What lingers in my own mind about Davoren is the incredible energy and spirit that came over him when wrestling to point the letters when he was writing his poetry. He would be so excited and vibrant, his gifts totally transformed him.”
