"EVEN now, more than a year after Davoren's death, I don't know what to do with my arms any more. After nineteen years of cradling, lifting, holding, massaging, comforting and hugging his body from babyhood to manhood, my arms feel empty, useless, pointless."
Jack Hanna has written an absorbing, moving and candid memoir of his son, the poet Davoren Hanna. Born in Dublin in 1975, Davoren had little control of his body. He was mute, and was assessed as mentally handicapped until he was seven.
He learned to communicate first by using a letter-board while sitting in his mother, Brighid's, lap. Later, in an autobiographical introduction to his book of poems, Not Common Speech, he recalled his breakthrough: "The word `Mama' pushed with folded fist across the black meadow of magnetic board liberated me from an eternity of nothingness." Davoren had devised a way of knocking off the letters he did not want by sweeping his hand across the blackboard.
At two, Davoren was provisionally assessed as mentally handicapped but his parents rejected this. "We could not accept that the dance of merriment in his eyes in response to the repartee in the home or his rapt concentration on a piece of music indicated a mental retardation."
Shortly after the blackboard triumph in 1983, his mother transferred him to the typewriter, through which (still sitting in her lap) he communicated more effectively. "I like a lisl kes [little kiss] please," he typed once. His vocabulary was limited, and he relied on phonetic spellings.
Davoren was attending the Central Remedial Clinic and St Michael's House, where some staff could not easily accept that a "child whom they generally saw locked in inertia could generate these sentences".
Hanna sees as unfortunate a "test" during which Brighid typed with Davoren while she wore a blindfold. The "so-called" tests did not go well, he tells us, because if Davoren was in a high state of spasticity or was tense or mistrustful of the person with whom he was working, nothing would happen.
Years later Davoren vented his anger at these tests: "When those who doubt the authenticity of my voice ask how can a boy like that possibly communicate with such severe physical handicap, a satanic fury overcomes me."
He was not averse to bad language. "Fukan tipriter," he wrote after the machine jammed. Another outlet for his frustration was "afukof and shut up."
He won several awards, including the Observer National Children's Poetry Competition and the Christy Brown Award. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis narrated an RTE documentary, Poised for Flight, on his life and work.
He withdrew into "almost total blankness" when told of his mother's death from a heart attack. The "inspirational mother who had cradled him into life and even more literally into communication was no more".
Davoren Hanna could transform suffering into poems striking in their expressive power and observation. Here is "How the Earth was Formed Quiz":
What does a volcano do?/ It sends Pliny the Roman naturalist/ rushing to Vesuvius's gaping jaw/ in search of its scarlet secret./And how was the earth's crust formed?/ Heaven's master-baker,/ Lord of Holocausts and light,/ touched his dough with fingers of fire/ and then sighed upon it./And do lines of latitude run north to south?/ Why a swallow's heart-quickening/ will tell the way home to his haven/ Whatever way the lines are drawn.
In his early teens Davoren wrote: "The temptation to die is very strong at the moment. I lie awake all night coughing and I hear God saying, `Come to me little boy' ... The long life story of Davoren Hanna is not to be." He died in his sleep at 19.