Dermot Bolger
Life
1959- ; b. 6 Feb., Finglas, Co. Dublin; ed.
St. Canices and Beneavin College; son of a merchant-sailor
from Wexford; suffered the early death of his mother, 1969; supported
in his writing ambitions by siblings; with his sister June [Considine
- as infra] he attended
a writers workshop run by Anthony Cronin and Sean McCann
at the Peoples House on the Grand Canal; worked as a factory
hand, 1978-79; a library assistant, 1979-84; appt. lit. dir. of
Grapevine Arts Centre; fnd.-member of Irish Writers Co-Operative,
with Neil Jordan, Ronan Sheehan, Steve MacDonagh, and others; fnd.
dir. Raven Arts Press, 1979; Arts Council Member, 1989-93; member
of Aosdána, 1991; works incl. The Habit of Flesh (1979)
, poems; other collections include Finglas Lives (1980),
No Waiting America (1982), Internal Exiles (1986),
and Leinster Street Ghosts (1989), containing the longer
poem The Lament for Arthur Cleary, a stage-adaptation
of which won the Edinburgh Fringe award 1989, under direction of
David Byrne of Wet Paint, with dramaturg Maureen White; m. Bernadette
[Bernie, née Clifton], a nurse, with whom he
had two children, Donnacha and Diarmuid; |
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issued Blinded by Light (Abbey Peacock
1990), winner of Whitbread Prize; In High Germany (Gate 1990),
premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival and later filmed by RTÉ
(1993), featuring three Irish football fans who follow their international
side abroad for the 1988 European Championships; played at Irish
Arts Centre, NY 1993; re-shown in Two Lives series (RTÉ
1, Thurs. Nov. 3, 1995), also produced at Edinburgh Festival, 1995,
making him the only writer to win at Edinburgh twice; The Holy
Ground (Gate Theatre 1990), played with In High Germany
under joint title The Tramway End; One Last White
Horse, premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival (Peacock 1992);
novels incl. Night Shift (1985), telling how Donal Flynn
copes with his girlfriends pregnancy, a rushed marriage, and
the brutality and sadness of the underside of city life, won the
Macauley Fellowship; |
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issued The Womans Daughter (1987,
rev. 1991), a tale of incestuous love with a hidden offspring and
the abuse of women in small-town Ireland, written in three parts
set in different periods; received Macaulay Fellowship, 1987; shortlisted
Hughes Fiction Prize, 1988; winner of Guinness Peat Award, 1989;
The Journey Home (1989), a story of the crazy, unofficial
lives of Hano [Francis Hanrahan], Katie and Shay, and particularly
the latter couples flight from Dublin after having murdered
the head of the Plunkett dynasty which brought about Shays
death and abused Hano; ends with their taking shelter in the big
house of a humanitarian old Ango-Irish lady, evicted by her
Irish rural neighbours; became an Irish best-seller in Viking edn.
of 1990; |
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issued Emilys Shoes (1992), an
exploration of fetishism and the roots of a mans unhappiness],
shortlisted for Irish Times/Aer Lingus Prize, 1992; issued A
Second Life (1994), involving a formerly adopted childs
search for his real mother now he is a man, taking him to the Irish
village where she lived; also April Bright (Peacock, Aug.
1996), a play; ed. The Bright Wave: An Tonn Gheal (1986),
anthology of translated contemporary Gaelic poetry, and ed. Letters
from the New Island (1987-89), pamphlets series; ed. Invisible
Dublin: A Journey through Dublins Suburbs (1991), an
attempt to chronicle the lives of the new Dubliners ...);
also ed., The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction
(1993), asserting prefatorially that the new writers are drawing
on deep reserves to drive literature into a state of renewal
(xvi), so that the centre is shifting in Irish writing
(xx); corrected and reissued in 1994; |
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executive editor of New Island Books in 1992
after collapse of Raven Arts Press; awards incl. AE Memorial Award;
awarded Macaulay Fellowship, and received the Sunday Tribune
Arts Award; issued Fathers Music (1997), a novel of
Dublin gangsterdom; winner of The Stuart Parker BBC Award and Samuel
Beckett Award in 1990 and the Æ []George Russell] Memorial
Award in 1996; conceived and ed. with Paul Daniels, a collective
novel comprised of chapters by Irish writers each set
in a different room of Finbars Hotel (1997), incl.
commissioned chapters by Jennifer Johnston, Colm Toibin, Roddy Doyle,
Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, et al.; issued New and Selected
Poems (1998); Temptation (2000), a novel; issued The
Valparaiso Voyage (2001), dealing with the return of a troubled
Irishman and his relationship with a Nigerian asylum-seeker and
people from his past; suffered the death of his wife Bernie (aetat.
51), May 2000; Anthony Cronic contrib. an affectionate obituary
to the Sunday Independent (30 May 2010); |
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DB issued The Reed Bed (2002), poetry;
wrote Départ Et Arrivée, a play with Paris-based
Iranian writer exile Kazem Shahryari (Paris Arts Studio, Nov.-Dec.
2004); also, a new play about three generations of two Ballymun
families, These Green Heights (Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun
24 Nov. - 11 Dec. 2004); reviews TV for The Village ; issued
The Family on Paradise Pier (2005), ficitonalised family
saga based on the Anglo-Irish Goold Verschoyles of Donegal; issued
Dialogue in Fading Light: New and Selected Poems (2005);
writer in residence to S. County Dublin, and ed. County Lines:
A Portrait of Life in South Dublin County (2006); also Walking
the Road (Tallaght Arts Centre April 2007), a play on Francis
Ledwidge; issued External Affairs (2009), poems; ed., Night and
Day: Twenty-four Hours in the Life of Dublin City (2009), incorporating
50 of his own poems and others by South Dublin poets, each with
photo; issued a re-write of his 1993 novel A Second Life
(2010); |
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issued New Town Soul (2010), a novel
for young readers set in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, involving teenagers
Joey, Shane, and Geraldine, and an elderly schizophrenic living
as a vagrant in Castledawson [for Frascati] House; wrote The
Parting Glass (2010), a play resuming the story of Eoin of IN
High Germany, now settled there and deciding to return to Ireland;
it features the Thierry Henry hand-goal that kicked Ireland out
of the FIFA World Cup as a metaphor of the place of Ireland in the
European Union, set during the economic down-turn; premiered at
axis Ballymun, with Ray Yeates as Eoin, 1 June 2010; toured Ireland,
Bolger and his wife Bernie are the dedicatees of Sebastian Barrys
On Canaans Side (2011); |
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his RSC-commissioned stage-adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses
of 1993 was staged by Tron Theatre Co. (Glasgow), and in Belfast
as part of the Belfast Festival at QUB, October 2012, afterwards
touring Dublin (Project Arts Centre) and Cork (Everyman Th.);
published collected poems as That Which is Suddenly Precious
(2015); issues Lonely Sea and Sky (2016), the story of
young Jack Roche of Wexford in the wartime Irish Merchant Navy,
based on his fathers experience and on an incident from
1943 when the crew of an Irish vessel risked their lives to rescue
168 shipwrecked German sailors; June Considine is a sister; issued
An Ark of Light (2018), a novel about a woman who strikes
out for independence and becomes a caravan lady and a beacon of
kindness in Co. Mayo; launched at Hodges Figgis, 6 Sept., 2018;
June Considine [infra]
is his older sister. FDA OCIL
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Dermot Bolger (Facebook Profile, Oct. 2015) |
[ top ]
Works
Poetry |
- Finglas Watching the Night (1977); Never a Dull Moment
[Raven Arts, No. 4] (Dublin: Raven Arts Press [1979]), 32pp.;
- The Habit of Flesh (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1979);
- Finglas Lilies (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1980);
- No Waiting America (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1982) [ltd.
edn. 25 signed copies];
- Internal Exiles (Dublin: [Dolmen] Raven Arts Press 1986)
- Leinster Street Ghosts (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1989)
[incl. Lament for Arthur Cleary];
- Taking My Letters Back: New and Selected Poems (Dublin:
New Island Press 1998);
- The Reed Bed (Oldcastle: Gallery Books 2000), 78pp.;
- The Chosen Moment (Dublin: New Island 2004), 28pp.;
- Dialogue in Fading Light: New and Selected Poems (Dublin:
New Island Press 2005), 150pp.;
- External Affairs: New Poems (Dublin: New Island Press
2009), 77pp.
- That Which is Suddenly Precious: New and Selected Poems
(Dublin: New Island Press 2015), 244pp.
- Lonely Sea and Sky (Dublin: New Island Press 2016), q.pp.
|
Fiction |
- Night Shift (Dingle: Brandon 1985; Dublin: Raven 1989;
London: Penguin 1993) [A.E. Memorial Prize, 1986];
- The Womans Daughter (Raven Arts 1987), Do
., [extended version as] Womans Daughter (Viking/Penguin
1991), and Do ., [extended version, Swedish trans. (1994),
and Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Flamingo 2003), 262pp.;
- The Journey Home (London: Viking/Penguin 1990; 1991)
[in French 1992, Germany 1992 and Swedish, 1993; Do. [rep.
edn.] (London: Flamingo 2003), 392pp.;
- Emilys Shoes (London: Viking/Penguin 1992), 299pp.;
- A Second Life (London: Viking/Penguin 1994), 312pp. [initial
version of Chap. 1 pub. separately as In Edwards Garden,
with wood engravings by David Moyer, NY: Caliban Press 1995, 27pp.,
5 lvs. of pls.; 80 copies; 19cm.];
- Fathers Music: A Novel (London: Flamingo 1997;
pb. 1998), 388pp.;
- Temptation (London: Flamingo 2000), 222pp.;
- The Valparaiso Voyage (London: Flamingo 2001), 256pp.;
- The Family on Paradise Pier (London: Fourth Estate 2005;
pb. Harper 2006), 550pp.;
- New Town Soul (Dublin: Little Island 2010), 257pp.
- An Ark of Light (Dublin: Little Island Press 2018), qpp.
- Secrets Never Told (2020).
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Plays |
- The Lament for Arthur Cleary (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1989)
[ded. to David Byrne and Maureen White], Do ., in David
Grant, sel. & intro., The Crack in the Emerald: New Irish
Plays (London: Nick Hern Books 1990; 1994);
- A Dublin Quartet (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1992), containing
Blinded by Light, In High Germany, The
Holy Ground, and One Last White Horse];
- In High Germany (Gate 1990) [based on 1988 European Championships,
it follows Irish soccer fans abroad];
- A Dublin Bloom: An Original Free Adaptation of James Joyce's
Ulysses [New Island/New Drama] (Dublin: New Island Press 1996),
112pp. [& Do., London: Nick Hern 1995];
- The Townland of Brazil (Dublin: New Island Press 2007),
120pp.;
- Plays 1, introduced by Fintan OToole [[Methuen
Contemporary Dramatists] (London: Methuen 2000), xiv, 210pp. [The
Lament for Arthur Cleary; In High Germany; The
Holy Ground; Blinded by the Light.;
- The Ballymun Trilogy (Dublin: New Island Press2010),
322pp.
|
Miscellaneous |
- ed., After The War is Over: Irish Writers Protest at the
Visit of Ronald Reagan (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1984);
- ed., The Bright Wave/An Tonn Gheal: Poetry in Irish Now,
with a preface by Alan Titley (Dublin: Raven Arts 1986; rep 1988,
1992) [anthology of contemporary Gaelic poetry with translations;
An Duais Bhord Na Gaeilge, award];
- ed., Letters from the New Island [a series of polemical
pamphlets, 1987-89] (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1991); ed., Invisible
Dublin: A Journey through Dublins Suburbs (Dublin: Raven
Arts Press 1991) [infra];
- ed., Wexford Through its Writers (Dublin: New Island
Books 1993), pb., 125pp.;
- ed., Padraic Pearse, Rogha Dánta: Selected Poems,
with an intro. by intro. Eugene McCabe (Dublin: New Island Books,
1993), 80pp. [Intro., pp.7-18; Iar-fhocal le Michael Davitt, pp.75-79].;
- ed., Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (London:
Picador 1993; NY, Vintage 1994), 554pp. [infra];
- ed. Francis Ledwidge: Selected Poems, foreword by Seamus
Heaney (New Island Books 1992);
- ed., Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad (Dublin:
New Island Books 1993; 1995);
- ed., with Ciaran Carty, The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction
(Dublin: New Islands Books 1995) [incl. Mike McCormack, Colum
McCann, Michael Taft, Marina Carr, Eoin MacNamee, Mary Costello];
- [ed.,] Finbars Hotel (Dublin: New Island 1997)
[chapter-stories by Bolger, Colm Toibín, Roddy Doyle, Jennifer
Johnston, Joe OConnor, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton];
- ed., Greatest Hits for Irish One-act Plays (London: Hern
1997), 120pp. [incls. Thomas McLoughlin, Greatest Hits;
Antoine Ó Flatharta, Blood Guilty; Clare Dowling,
The Marlboro Man, John McKenna, Faint Voices.
- Ladiess Night at Finbars Hotel (Dublin: New
Island 1999), 270pp. [do. by Maeve Binchy, Clare Boylan, Emma
Donoghue, Anne Haverty, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Kate ORiordan];
- ed., County Lines: A Portrait of Life in South Dublin County
(Dublin: New Island Press 2006), 206pp. [stories, memoirs].
- ed., Night and Day: Twenty-four Hours in the Life of Dublin
City (Dublin: New Island Press 2009), 123pp. [incls. poems
from his own External Affairs].
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Journalism (selected:) |
- How Poetry Warps the Mind, Sunday Independent,
Living & Leisure, 9L (8 Dec. 1994) founding of
Raven Arts];
- Singing Detective Work, review of W. Stephen Gilbert,
Fight and Kick and Bite : The Life and Work of Dennis Potter,
in Tribune Magazine (3 Dec. 1995), Books, p.26;
- Home for Christmas, tale of uneasy homecoming, death
and revenge, in Sunday Independent (31 Dec. 1995),
Living, 29L;
- A December Morning in Leinster Street, 1985 [poems],
in Sunday Independent (29 Dec. 1995).
- [...]
- Celebration of a vibrant spirit [....], review of
Tom Inglis, Making Love: A Memoir, in The Irish Times
(4 May 2013) , Weekend, p.12.
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Bibliographical
Details
Invisible
Dublin: A Journey through the Dublin Suburbs,
Ed. & intro. Dermot Bolger (Raven Arts P. 1991), 178pp. [ded., For
my father and in memory of my mother, a Wexford lad and a Monaghan girl,
two new Dubliners]; Ferdia MacAnna; Roddy Doyle [Dead Bones
and Chickens ]; Sara Berkeley; Hilary Fannin; Aileen OMara;
Paul Kimmage; June Considine; Podge Rowan; Deirdre Purcell; Michael
OLoughlin; Sebastian Barry [Mountjoy Square 1974 ]; Peter
Sheridan; Aidan Murphy; Francis Stuart; Noel McFarlane; Fintan OToole;
Gene Kerrigan; Nell McCafferty; Kieran Fagan; Leland Bardwell; Heather
Brett; Annette Halpin; Eamon Dunphy; Eavan Boland [The Need to be
Ordinary ]; Conleth OConnor; Joe Jackson; no biog. notices.
[ top ]
Picador
Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, ed. Dermot
Bolger (London Picador 1993; corrected edn. 1994), 518pp. Authors included:
John Banville [from Mefisto ]; Leland Bardwell [The Hairdresser
]; Sebastian Barry [from The Engine of Owl-Light ]; Mary Beckett
[Heaven ]; Samuel Beckett [For to End Yet Again ]; Sara
Berkeley [The Skys Gone Out ]; Dermot Bolger [from The
Journey Home ]; Clare Boylan [Villa Marta ]; Shane Connaughton
[Ojus ]; Mary Dorcey [The Husband ]; Roddy Doyle [from
The Snapper ]; Anne Enright [Men and Angels ]; Hugo Hamilton
[from Surrogate City]; Aidan Higgins [from Balcony of Europe
]; Desmond Hogan [from A Curious Street ]; Jennifer Johnston
[from The Christmas Tree ]; Neil Jordan [Last Rites ];
Molly Keane [from Good Behaviour ]; Maeve Kelly [Orange Horses
]; Benedict Kiely [from Proxopera ]; Mary Lavin [Happiness
]; Mary Leland [from The Killeen ]; Eugene McCabe [Cancer
]; Patrick McCabe [from The Butcher Boy ]; John McGahern [High
Ground ]; Tom McIntyre [The Man-Keeper ]; Bernard MacLaverty
[Between Two Shores ]; Bryan MacMahon [A Womans Hair
]; Eoin MacNamee [If Angels had Wings ]; Deirdre Madden [Remembering
Light and Stone ]; Aidan Matthews [Incident on El Camino Real
]; Gerardine [sic] Meaney [Counterpoint ]; Brian Moore [The
Sight ]; Val Mulkerns [Memory and Desire ]; Eilís
Ní Duibhne [Blood and Water ]; Edna OBrien [from
What a Sky ]; Bridget OConnor [Postcards ]; Joseph
OConnor [Mothers were All the Same ]; Sean OFaolain
[The Talking Trees ]; Michael OLoughlin [A Rock-n-Roll
Death ]; David Park [Oranges from Spain ]; Glenn Patterson
[from Burning Your Own ]; Francis Stuart [from Black List,
Section H ]; Colm Tóibín [from The Heather Blazing
]; William Trevor [The Ballroom of Romance ]; Robert McLiam Wilson
[from Ripley Bogle ]; Biographical notes [titles without dates],
509-518pp.; Julia OFaolain, review of Dermot Bolger, Temptation
(Flamingo), pb., in Times Literary Supplement, 16 June 2000,
p.25.
[ top ]
Criticism
- Realist or Fetishist?: Novelist Dermot Bolger talks to
Neil Sammells, in Irish Studies Review, 1 (1992),
pp.23-3;
- Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New
Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press 1997), pp76-79 [infra];
- Conor MacCarthy, Ideology and Geography in Dermot Bolgers
The Journey Home, in Irish University Review (Spring/Summer
1997), pp.98-110;
- Liam Harte, A Kind of Scab: Irish Identity in the Writings
of Dermot Bolger and Joseph OConnor, in Irish Studies
Review, 20 (Autumn 1997), pp.17-22;
- Conor MacCarthy, Modernisation without Modernism: Dermot
Bolger and the Dublin Renaissance, in Modernisation:
Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts
Press 2000) [Chap. 3], pp.135-64 [infra];
- Martine Pelletier, Dermot Bolgers Drama, in
Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre,
ed. Eamonn Jordan (Blackrock: Carysfort Press 2000), pp.249-56.
- Jim OHanlon [interview] in Theatre Talk: Voices of
Irish Theatre Practitioners, ed. Lilian Chambers, Ger Fitzgibbon,
Eamonn Jordan (Blackrock: Carysfort Press 2001), pp.29-42.
- Fintan OToole, The Former People, review of
The Family on Paradise Pier, together with Sebastian Barry,
A Long, Long Way, in The Guardian (Sat., 7 May 2005)
[infra];
- Peter Cunningham, My sister took the place of my mother
[on June Considine and Dermot Bolgers childhood], in The
Irish Times (8 May 2009) [online;
accessed 07.05.2019].
- Kevin Kiely, review of New Town Soul, in Books Ireland
(Feb. 2011), p.12.
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See also unlisted remarks in Commentary, infra.
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[ top ]
Commentary
Shaun Richards, Progressive Regression
in Contemporary Irish Culture, [pt. 3 of] The Triple Play
of Irish History, in Irish Review, Winter-Spring 1997, pp.38-39,
remarks on In High Germany : It is a survey of the accumulated
cultural and economic failures of modern Ireland; but it is also a denunciation
of an essentialism which brutalised more than liberated. Richards
quotes Eoin: All my life it seems, somebody somewhere has always
been trying to tell me what Ireland I belonged in and comments that
the only Ireland he can relate to is a football team with a menagerie
of accents. (p.40.)
Rüdiger Imhof, review
of Contemporary Irish Fiction, reviewed with other works (Linen
Hall Review, 10.3; Winter 1993), rag-bag ... loquacious, singularly
silly introduction ... [the present book] offers forty-six examples
... after 1968 ... its raison dêtre remaining undiscernible.
Nothing by Brian Moore, James Plunkett, John Broderick ... one finds
Aidan Mathews, Colum Tóibín, Shane Connaughton, Sebastian
Barry, and the ed. himself writers who have scarcely cut a figure
on the fiction front ... smacks of you-scratch-my-back ... . Note, Raven
Arts and New island imprints constantly criticised by Books Ireland
First Flush for [this imprint criticised for orthographical
slackness as in edition of Ledwidge poems (1993).
Carol Birch, The Last
of their Kind, review of Fathers Music, in TLS
(4 April 1997); Tracy
is one such lost soual, the kind of silly
girl who shrieks loudly in the street with her friends, hoping to be looked
at. Having run away from her stultifying family life, she lives an amoral,
hedonistic life on the London rave scene, dedicated to the pursuit of
fun. Abandoned as a baby by her Irish diffler father, she finds herself,
at odd moments on the hung-over mornings in all-night record stores sneaking
a listen to crackly field recordings of the old Sean-nós
singers of the West of Ireland. When Tracey meets Luke, a married Irish
businessman, she embarks on an affair
; notes that Bolger uses depictions
of contemporary ugliness as a vehicle for a deeply romantic vision. Also
reviewed by Jack Hanna, Irish Times [?12 March 1997].
Catriona Reilly, review
of Taking My Letters Back (New Island), in Irish Times,
16 Jan. 1999; characterises author as witness to Dublin working-class
life and keen and sympathetic observer of difficulties of estate and highrise
existence; the sheer spitting anger of this work is admirable;
Bolger drawn to atrocity; cites Stardust Sequence; Blasphemy
[dealing with abuser Brendan Smyth], Bluebells for Grainne,
Botanic Gardens: Triptych; unvarying line lengths and
metre, and the over-suse of full rhyme, and verbal bagginess [...] mean
that Bolger fails to achieve for Dublin what Carol Ann Duffy or the gritty
Tom Leonard have done for Scottish city life; ultimately,
this is a poetry that lives in its detail; makes a success
of its defiantly humanist arguments.
[Q.auth..], review
of Emilys Shoes (Viking 1992), in Times Literary Supplement
(12 June 1992): the story of Michael MacMahon, an early-orphaned shoe-fetishist
and reclusive Dublin librarian for whom life is frigid celibate affair
thawed only by my brief and solitary encounters with shoes.
His aunt Emily establishes his fetish; aged eleven, in his dreams he
fondles her breasts and finds them like hard sculptured plastic,
as smooth to the touch as patent shoe leather. Clare, the girl
with whom he most conspicuously fails to make contact (shoes are
alright, but feet are nicer when you learn to play with them),
us extensively agitated by Catholicism, and harbours a trauma of sexual
abuse in a Canadian childhood. Michaels story ends with a climactic
visit to a Visions Field beyond Ballyboughal where the Blessed
Virgin fails to appear, but he is nevertheless possessed by a
glowing compassion and concern. Peter Kemp enumerates the Catholic
iconographies of the text and concludes, like much else in the
book, this lurch from soles to souls fails to secure a foothold on credibility.
(Times Literary Supplement, 12 June 1992, p.20.)
Gerry Smyth, The Novel
and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press
1997), pp.76-79: [Regarding the formation of identity in relation
to place]: Whereas Doyle set his books in the fictional, albeit
typical, area of Barrytown, Bolger maps a much more literal city, describing
an urban landscape familiar to many readers of Irish fiction and to most
Irish people. But if the geography is local, the actions described - lust,
prostitution, hypocrisy, corruption are all part of a much wider condition
for which the new Dublin is seemingly not prepared. The Journey Home
is thus as much anthropological and polemical as novelistic in its orientation,
constructed by its author to shock a complacent Irish bourgeoisie with
its angry portrayal of a disaffected, betrayed Irish generation.
(p.77.)
[ top ]
Harry Browne takes the mickey
out of Dermot Bolgers story Lets Dance, in which
a 12-year old girl Eva (a virago, acc. to her [mother]) experiences
incestuous feelings for her brother Art, who is covered with gore from
a mackerel hunt. (1 Dec. 2001). Browne writes: Yuck, there might
be some symbolism there all right, and well permit Bolger the heavy
indulgence. Its too bad all our blood-spattered images this week
werent in the name of Art. (Irish Times, Radio Review,
1 Dec. 2001, Weekend, p.6.)
Desmond Traynor, review
of The Valparaiso Voyage (Flamingo): Brendan Brogan, compulsive
gambler, banished to garden shed to become Hen Boy when
his widowed father remarries a young woman, Phyllis, who brings her
previous child Cormac with her; conflict with Pete Clancy, son of bullying
Fianne Fáil-man; returning to Dublin-Navan in the current period
of economic boom, ten years after faking his own death in a Scottish
train crash to escape debts and provide for his wife and son out of
the insurance, Brendan rescues a Nigerian woman Ebun from a racist attack;
re-encounters his childhood antagonists; literary detective fiction
ending in shoot-out. Traynor remarks, What is striking [...] is
that it is when Bolger is concentrating on the more personal and intimate
details of his central characters life, and his tangled, fraught
and emotionally ambivalent relationships with his prevaricating father,
with the insecure Phyllis, with the gay Cormac, and the equally gay
Conor, that the writing hits its truest and most resonant stride, and
mines a deep vein of feeling. (Books Ireland, March 2002).
Julia OFaolain,
review of Dermot Bolger, Temptation (Flamingo), remarks on his
grim surveys of Dublin and its shifting Zeitgeist. Further,
the author on record as saying of one of his books he wanted it
to be like Dickens or Graham Greene; set in FitzGeralds Hotel,
haven of well-heeled families; Whereas Bolgers earlier work
uses damaged children - or adults who have been damaged in childhood -
to show up the wickedness of Irelands villains, he has no flipped
his narrative coin to focus on the fragility of rectitude and the strains
of parenting; concerns Alison and Peadar Gill; arrival of Chris,
a former boyfriend; reviewer cites limitations of characters idiom
dialogue and tenders criticism: Picaresque novels like Bolgers
earlier ones can just about get away with broad effects
and in
the past reviewers have been indulgent about this tin ear for speech patterns.
When focussing on characters inner lives, however, middle-class
self-scrutiny requires subtler insight than the prose can here provide.;
characterises Alison as belonging to new, suddenly prosperous, creedless
bourgeoisie whose dazed psyche offers at least as much challenge
as the underworlds which Bolger has so vividly described elsewhere.
(Times Literary Supplement, 16 June 2000, p.25.)
Anne Fogarty, Sex,
power and revenge in modern Ireland, review of The Valparaiso
Voyage (Flamingo), remarks that Bolgers new novel ; fuses
searing reportage of contemporary Ireland, traversing all of its instantly
recognisable ills - corruption, racism, provincialism and shameful episodes
of emotional and sexual abuse - with the stylised conventions of a thriller;
above all a telling exploration of the dark aspects of masculinity;
symbolically emotional and political abuse intertwine; provocatively
sexualises all male familial relations and uses homosexuality as a metaphor
for the lost bonds between father and son and between male siblings;
The [novel] is, however, about the prospect of return rather than
exile; nonetheless [...] insistent on vindicating the seemingly
failed father figures who have presided over this unregenerate society;
his investigation [...] help him to understand his fathers
coldness and violence and even to affirm his Fianna Fáil-style
rectitude despite his involvement in crooked planning deals. Fogarty
concludes, In using the raw sociological data of contemporary
Irish life as the basis for a compelling and expertly executed thriller,
Dermot Bolger has produced a polished fable for our times [... b]ut
the closure sought by this tale of male self-discovery remains an impossible
goal that eludes even the reach of fantasy. (The Irish Times
[Weekend], 2 Nov. 2001.)
Jonathan Keates, review
of Dermot Bolger, The Valparaiso Voyage (London: HarperCollins),
385pp., in Times Literary Supplement (16 Nov. 2001), p.24: As
the destiny and horizons of its narrator, Brendan Brogan, shift and change,
so too does the Ireland in which the novel is mostly set. The drama here
is one of socio-economical change, as ould sod turns into Euroland and
an entire value system winces and buckles under the metamorphosis.
Keates summarises a plot in which Brendans father Eamonn marries
Phyllis after the death of his wife, and his banished to the hen house,
while her son Cormac, the favoured child, protects Brendan against the
sexual abuse they both endure before flying off to a more authentic
homosexual experience [Keates] in Dublin; Eamonn is murdered; trail
leads to Barney Clancy, whom Eamonn served as henchman; Barneys
malevolent son Pete becomes the object of Brendans vengeance, having
faked his own death and assumed the identity of Cormac. It is Ebun, the
Nigerian woman, who finally pulls the trigger on Pete Clancy. Keates remarks,
Essentially, this is a tale of Irish fatherhood in its various avatars,
stern, combatant, sentimental, guilt-wracked, almost everywhere dysfunctional.
Keates questions the mix of genre - thriller and search for a father -
but finds the journey taken worthwhile.
[ top ]
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation:
Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press
2000) [Chap. 3], pp.135-64: The ideological polemic of the novel
[The Journey Home ] is directed at the idea of a bourgeoisie that
has rural origins. (p.156.) The novel, and OTooles
article [Going West ..., 1985], are based, then, on a belief
in the compatibility of an ideology based on tradition and an economic
practice based on modernistaiont. What both fail to account for is th
efact that the construction of a cohesive nation-state was often a precondition
for the development of industrial capitalism in European history. [...]
Furthermore, the Bildungsroman form is one which dramatises on the level
of the individual subject the universal narrative of modernity that nationalism
proposes at the level of the ethnic group. (p.157.) The fact
is that Bolger and OToole are closer to their Revival antagonists
than they think [...] The polemical point is to suggest that modernity
in the Republic has been betrayed by nationalism; this forecloses any
discussion of the nature of modernisation itself, or of the kind of modernising
development initiated by Lemass. This approach, however, is typical of
the novel, and of Bolgers work more generally, which tends to depict
the condition of Irish modernity, but not to offer a sustained analysis
of it. (p.158.)
Further [McCarthy]: But in Bolgers
Ireland, the capacity of the core to exploit the periphery is only to
be measured by the extent that the country has succeeded in conquering
the city. Thus, Bolger ends up producing a discourse of the countryside
that is not, in fact, so far removed from the Revivalists that he so
resolutely seems to be turning away from. (p.160.) [I]t
would seem [...] that neither Bolger nor [Roddy] Doyle, at least partly
because of their reaction against an aesthetically radical but apparently
institutionalised Modernism, have found a way of avoiding the nets of
Romantic Revivalism. Therefore, one is forced to conclude, without wishing
to dismiss the movement tout court, that the most prominent figures
[of] the Dublin Renaissance has yet produced have thus far
failed to create a true alternative to the tradition from which they
are in flight. (p.164.) Further, Bolgers writing,
for all its disavowal of the discourse of the nation, remains as imbricated
with that discourse as the literary modes that it sees itself as replacing.
(p.183.)
Fintan OToole, The
Former People, review of The Family on Paradise Pier, in
The Guardian (Sat., 7 May 2005): Bolgers The Family
on Paradise Pier draws both on a real family and on recognisable historical
characters, including the left-wing agitator Jim Gralton, the Behan family
and even, briefly, Charles Haughey. The narrative is partly based on conversations
taped by the author in 1992 with Sheila Fitzgerald, then almost 90. Though
he changes her first name to Eva, and does likewise with those of her
four siblings, he retains their sonorous family name — Goold Verschoyle
— and follows their lives between 1915 and 1946, through the collapse
of their world and their attempts, by means of art and politics, to create
another. They interact with great events — the Irish and Russian revolutions,
the British general strike, the Spanish civil war and the second world
war — but have no real effect on any of them. / Eva does not, as she dreams,
become a great painter. The Marxist revolutions that Brendan and Art dream
of dont happen. Brendan disappears into the gulags. The family falls
to pieces. Idealism is betrayed, but for Eva especially it is not abandoned.
Though the breadth of the canvas does lead to an occasional loss of focus,
Bolger nevertheless sustains a remarkably vivid account of the way those
who dont count may nevertheless matter. His best novel since The
Journey Home in 1990, it is a moving testament to the ability of the
human personality to endure even when the world it inhabits has no great
use for it.
Liam Harte, Tragic
Trio Trapped by History: politics is character in family saga set against
European upheaval, review of The Family on Paradise Pier,
in The Irish Times, 9 April 2005 ), Weekend, p.12: It is
almost 20 years since Dermot Bolger complained about an idea of
nationhood which simply could not contain the Ireland of concrete and
dual carriageway (which is as Irish as turf and boreens) that was a
reality before our eyes. Much of his literary output since then,
as novelist, poet, playwright and editor, has been devoted to challenging
the dominance of this nationalist aesthetic by writing from the perspective
of various disenfranchised social groups: emigrants, the suburban working
class, the Protestant minority. In the process he has become one of
the leading sponsors of a liberal post-nationalism predicated on the
need to accommodate the multiple strands of cultural difference and
ideological dissent within the imagined community of Irishness.
/ The Family on Paradise Pier shows Bolger extending his critique
of the concept of a historic Irish identity through an exploration of
the conflicting forms of ideological affiliation and alienation that
attended the birth of the State. [...] While, ideologically, the novel
resists the notion that history is destiny, it endorses the view that
politics is character, and herein lies its central weakness. Bolgers
decision to set his family saga against a swirling canvas of Europe-wide
social and political upheaval obliges him to anchor the action in specific
times and places throughout. Consequently, historical exposition often
gets in the way of subtle characterisation and the dialogue strains
under a dense mass of allusions. Only when Bolgers kaleidoscopic
lens settles on a single setting for a concentrated period – as happens
in Part Two, set in Co May in 1936 - do characters transcend their typicality
and grow in intimacy as individuals with complex interior lives. In
such moments The Family on Paradise Pier fulfils its ambituious
aim of imaginatively recreating defining tensions and tragedies of a
family, and a nation, in flux. [For full review, see infra.]
Fintan OToole, The
Former People, review of Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way,
and Dermot Bolger, The Family on Paradise Pier, in The Guardian
(q.d., 2005): ‘[...] Bolgers The Family on Paradise Pier
draws both on a real family and on recognisable historical characters,
including the left-wing agitator Jim. Gralton, the Behan family, and even,
briefly, Charles Haughey. The narrative is partly based on conversations
taped by the author in 1992 with Sheila Fitzgerald, then almost 90. Though
he changes her first name to Eva, and does likewise with those of her
four siblings, he retains their sonorous family name - Goold Verschoyle
-and follows their lives between 1915 and 1946, through the collapse of
their world and their attempts, by means of art and politics, to create
another. They interact with great events - the Irish and Russian revolutions,
the British general strike, the Spanish civilwar and the second world
war - but have no real effect on any of them. / Eva does not, as she dreams,
become a great painter. The Marxist revolutions that Brendan and Art dream
of dont happen. Brendan disappears into the gulags. The family falls
to pieces. Idealism is betrayed, but for Eva especially it is not abandoned.
Though the breadth ofthe canvas does lead to an occasional loss of focus,
Bolger nevertheless sustains a remarkably vivid account of the way those
who dont count may nevertheless matter. His best novel since The
Journey Home in 1990, it is a moving testament to the ability of the human
personality to endure even when the world it inhabits has no great use
for it.
Angela M. Cornyn, review
of New Town Soul, in Irish Independent (28 Nov. 2010): A
derelict house in the affluent suburb of Blackrock on Dublins southside,
three impressionable teenagers and a strange old man are the stuff of
Dermot Bolgers latest novel New Town Soul, a supernatural
thriller for young adults. [...] The old, dilapidated house at the end
of Castledawson Avenue and its unexpected inhabitant, an elderly, sick
man who seems to have been around forever, become the focal point of the
story which unravels for the three teens Shane, Joey and Geraldine. The
story hinges on secrets, and the willingness to explore self, relationships,
life issues and familiar surroundings. [...] The old man [who lives there]
has secrets a-plenty to share with his uninvited visitors, but these secrets
come at a very high price, which demands one to gamble or not with ones
soul. If a soul is snatched, then a person becomes a changeling,
someone forced to be part of a chain, after some person or power has snatched
their soul, and is condemned to an everlasting limbo. / So, beware
whatever you do in life, never let anyone snatch your soul.
How does someone snatch a soul? By making a pact with you; by promising
you your hearts most hidden desire ... Keep your soul safe ... Once
it is stolen, it can never truly be your own again. / New Town
Soul is a ghostly thriller situated in the real world of contemporary
teenage experience in Ireland. (See full-text version in RICORSO
Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index,
or direct.)
Christina Hunt Mahony,
review of The Lonely Sea and the Sky, in The Irish Times
(28 May 2016), Weekend Section: Dermot Bolger is a writer not easily
categorised, because he has published extensively across genres. He has
also played an important role in the history of the small Irish press
- first with the establishment of Raven Arts in 1977, and then with New
Island, the publisher of his latest work. Impressive as these achievements
are, it doesnt always do for a writer to defy or escape neat categories,
because these usually provide the foundation for a reputation. Diffusion
of talent can be confused with authorial dabbling or lack of focus. /
In his three decades of writing, Bolger has defied the odds to critical
acclaim both here and abroad. He is best known to Irish readers as the
author of working-class Dublin fiction, but his novels display a broader
range than that suggests. Fetishism, criminality, the precarious features
of immigrant and emigrant labour and life - its all there, interspersed
with touching vignettes of young love. / The Lonely Sea and Sky
[...] covers territory new for Bolger [being] based on incidents from
his fathers life as a merchant sailor out of Wexford. Most of its
action takes place outside Ireland, either aboard ship or in foreign ports
from Cardiff to Lisbon. More than 100 pages in the midsection are given
over to a detailed account of Christmas Eve and Day, 1943, in the Portuguese
capital. [...] Bolger gradually fills in the cast of characters Jack comes
to know and admire in the intimate world of a vessel described, rather
anachronistically, “as long as ten Model T Fords”. There is
the dodgy Mossy Tierney, who has promised to act as paterfamilias to young
Roche; the terminally ill second mate, Mr Walton; the benign Capt Donovan;
and the solitary and silent old salt, Myles Foley. / Much is made of the
camaraderie and strong bonds of loyalty among seamen, and, with its emphasis
on the long-standing traditions of seafarers, there is a timeless character
to the narrative. Indeed, the chosen diction is, at times, older than
its 1940s setting warrants. [...]. The Lonely Sea and Sky stands
as a war novel with insight into the era and its realities in two very
different neutral countries - a distinct contribution to the genre.
Mahony warns of surprise events at sea on the return journey from Lisbon
for which earlier warnings of danger at wartime do not prepare the reader.
(See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism >
Reviews, via index,
or as attached.)
[ top ]
Quotations
The Journey Home (1989): Far below, Dublin was moving
towards the violent crescendo of its Friday night, taking to the twentieth
century like an aborigine to whiskey. Studded punks pissed openly on corners.
Glue sniffers stumbled into each other, coats over their arms as they
tried to pick pockets. Addicts stalked rich-looking tourists. Stolen cars
zigzagged through the distant grey estates where pensioners prayed anxiously
behind bolted doors, listening for the smash of glass. In the new disco
bars children were queuing, girls of fourteen shoving their way up for
last drinks at the bar. (Quoted in Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation,
Pluto 1997, p. 35). Further, [Hanno:] I didnt understand
it then, but I grew up in perpetual exile: from my parents when on the
streets, from my own world when at home [...] How can you learn self-respect
if youre taught that where you live is not your real home?
(1991 Edn., p.8; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and
Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Four Courts 2000, p.153.)
The Journey Home (1989): Woods
like this have sheltered us for centuries. After each plantation this
is where we came, watched the invader renaming our lands, made raids
in the night on what had once been our home. Ribbonmen, Michael Dwyers
men, Croppies, Irregulars. Each century gave its name to those young
men. What will they call us in the future, the tramps, the Gypsies,
the enemies of the community that stays put? / I do not expect you to
wait for me, Cait. just dont leave, stand your ground. Tell him
about me sometime; teach him the first lesson early on: there is no
home, nowhere certain any more. And tell him of Shay, like our parents
told us the legends of old; tell him of the one who tried to return
to what can never be reclaimed. Describe his face, Cait, the raven black
hair, that smile before the car bore down and our new enslavement began.
/ [...] Sleep on, my love. Tomorrow or the next day they will come.
I will keep on running till they kill or catch me. Then it will be your
turn and the child inside you. Out there [...] commentators [are] discussing
the reaction of the nation [to the election results]. It doesnt
matter to internal exiles like us. No, were not exiles, because
you are the only nation I give allegiance to now [...] When you hold
me, Cait, I have reached home. (pp.293-94; McCarthy, pp.163-64;
also quotes description of family pub divided between countrymen nursing
pints upstairs in the upstairs bar and youngsters rolling joints in
the bar below, Bolger, p.32-33; McCarthy, p.156.)
Contemporary Irish Fiction (1992), Introduction:
Looking back at the achievements with the short-story form of Frank
OConnor and Sean OFaolain ... it is hard to know how much
they problems of censorship in their own country influenced their bent
towards short fiction ... or how much the society they existed in lent
itself more readily towards the short story. (p. xv); photographing
a moving object (p.xxvii); The ridiculous academic phrase
Anglo-Irish literature has helped to reinforce this crippling
notion of what constituted Irish literature; challenging and dissenting
young European literature ... in the act of redefining itself and the
world around it. (p.xxviii).
Inspiration: Bolger gives an account of the
inspiration of April Bright (Peacock Aug. 1996), in a collection
of letters and papers recovered from a skip where it was deposited by
new house-owners, and in his own experience of moving into a previously
occupied Dublin terrace house, with its ghosts. Among the
papers were the Catechism Notes of a girl, 1944. Bolger writes,
It is a play about the dreams and rivalries between growing sisters,
and of how a house can retain a yearning to hear the sounds of a child
again. It tries to explore the personal histories that lie buried within
every old street, through the unfolding of two sets of ordinary lives,
divided by half a century and yet linked by universal hopes and longings;
and by a final affirmation that love must be for sickness and for health,
for birth and for death - both equally rich parts of the diversity of
lives which are pledged together. (Sunday Independent,
20 Aug. 1995).
A Familiar Setting, Dermot Bolger
gives an account of Kellys Hotel, Rosslare, estab. by William
J. Kelly in licence of 1893, and his novel Temptation, set there; Alison
Gill returns to the hotel with her husband and children as in every
year, unaware that the man she almost married 20 years before has done
the same with his family during a different week; Bolger began the novel
in the week before his twentieth birthday and locked himself away in
a remote lighthouse to finish it last year. (The Irish
Times [Weekend], 17 June, 2000, p.4.)
[ top ]
Valparaiso: Dermot Bolger on poetic odysseys,
in Primary Colours [Finishing Lines column], The
Irish Times Magazine, 24 Nov. 2001: Reminisces about primary school
experience [in keeping with the series], and recounts the impressions
made on him by poems by Patrick Pearse (the only person who could
compare with Pearse was Christ - but even Christ would have been found
lacking), Ledwidge and Pádraig de Brún (1899-1960):
Tháinig long ó Valparaiso/Scaoileach téad a
seol sa chuan/Chuir a hainm dom I gcuimhe/Ríocht na greine, tír
na mbua/Gluais, ar sí, ar thuras fada [...].
Bolger quotes the translation by Theo Dorgan: A ship came from Valparaiso,/Let
go her anchor in the bay,/Her name flashed bright, it brought to mind/A
land of plenty, of sun and fame./Come, she said, on
a long journey/Away from this land of cloud and mist;/Under the Andes
blue-grey slopes/Theres a jewel city, by the sun kissed [...].
Bolger recounts in the present tense how he has become a guest at the
All Hallows Seminary in Drumcondra in order to work in a cell
on the most difficult novel I have ever written. He relates
the substance: The hero is a compulsive gambler, hopelessly in debt
and being made redundant, with his marriage falling apart in 1989, when
he takes the ultimate gamble by faking his death in a train crash and
disappearing. Alive he feels worthless, but dead - between compensation
and insurance - he can finally provide for his family. / He spends a decade
fleeing across Europe, haunted by his childhood. But the murder of his
father (a planning official due to testify about a crooked politician)
brings shadowy danger figures to the surface, leaving his wife and son
unknowingly exposed to danger and forcing him to return like a ghost to
watch over them. [...] Suddenly I know where my character was heading
in his mind when he disappeared. He was seeking the mythical place we
all imagined awaited us when we were young, where our lives would be utterly
changed. I left the attic knowing my title [...] mesmerised by the lure
of Pádraig de Brúns marvellous words. (End;
p.82.)
Ireland in Exile (1993), Introduction:
[refusal to be] silenced by distance (p.10); inconvenient
to our fabulous dream of ourselves (p.15); commuting emigrants
(p.7);
Home for Christmas Home
for Christmas, tale of uneasy homecoming, death and revenge,
Sunday Independent (31 Dec. 1995) [Living], 29L: [He] is
amongst his family now [..] is a different person from the one I had
known there or the one I glimpsed in that hotel in Glasnevin.
[The story is about a mentally illness.]
Phosphorescent: Let us wake in Leinster
Street, / Both of us still twenty six, / On a December morning in 1985
... When you were still too shy / To dress yourself while I watched
/ Your limbs garbed in light ... The phosphorescence of our lives /
Still glowing with this happiness. (A December Morning in
Leinster Street, 1985; in Sunday Independent, 29 Dec. 1995,
Poems.)
A novel starts ...: A
novel idea: why it was time for a rewrite, in The Irish Times
(18 Sept. 2010), Weekend Review, p.8: A novel starts by being
about one thing, but as a citizen you have your antennae open to the discourse
occurring within your society. Often, while writing the first draft of
A Second Life, when I turned on a radio or overheard conversations
on buses, I realised how ever-growing numbers of mothers and children
separated during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were now desperate to find
each other. Despite huge obstacles, people were attempting to take tentative
steps towards finding the stranger who was their parent or child, never
sure whether such approaches would be welcomed or rebuffed. / Adoption
gradually became the novels central theme, starting to echo the
hidden stories that were finally being told around me. People once silenced
by shame were no longer being silenced. Irish society was never ruled
by an obsessive devotion to religion; it was ruled by a fetish for respectability,
the main facet of which involved hiding family secrets. This wall of silence
was finally being eroded by individual voices in 1993 – a decade before
films such as The Magdalene Sisters – but the physical walls behind
which the adoption files were kept remained as impenetrable as ever.
(For full text version, see RICORSO Library, Authors,
via index,
or direct.)
Making sense: I dont think novelists
are obliged to do anything except write novels[.] And I think that theres
a very great danger in seeing novelists as spokespeople for anything
other than themselves. The word novelist is a very grand term. I can
only talk about myself: for me writing has always been my way of trying
to make sense of the physical world around me. And in doing so, hopefully,
that world will also make sense to the people who read my books.
(Quoted in Arminta Wallace, Out with the auld, in with the new
[on literary Dublin], in The Irish Times (12 March 2011, Weekend,
p.1.)
Dublin-ers: Im like the vast
and overwhelming majority of Dubliners in that I dont have a drop
of Dublin blood in me[.] My father is from a family of seven in Wexford
town; my mother was from a family of 11 on a small farm in Monaghan. A
number of them came to Dublin during the war. Almost all of them had to
emigrate. This mutability, Bolger adds, is written into the DNA
of Dublin. For any city to be a lively, vibrant place it needs to
have a perpetual influx of new people coming in with new ideas and new
cultures and new influences. Forty years ago that influx was coming from
Monaghan and Wexford, and its coming from Lithuania and Poland now.
(Arminta Wallace, idem.)
Posted on Facebook (10.09.2018) - |
When you are a young writer what you need most is, first
of all, the support of loved ones within your family. As a teenager
I was incredibly lucky with the three older siblings who essentially
raised me after my mothers early death. My sister Deirdre
carefully typed all my poems on her lunch break in work, my
other sister June was the sympathetic and wise sounding board
to whom I first read each poems and my big brother Roger liberated
Deirdre from her typing duties by also liberating for me –
as a surprise on my 15th birthday – a huge office typewriter,
which went from sitting on the offices of a factory in Finglas
to sitting on our living room table. Like many a commando operation,
the details of this friendly liberation are still covered by
the Official Secrets Act, but advances in forensic science means
that investigators can now seek evidence by examining that same
typewriter, which is on display in The Little Museum of Dublin.
The second thing that a young writer needs is someone from outside
his or her family who will take their dreams and their writings
seriously. I was blessed in having three such people –
my English teacher Colm Hewitt, the great poet Anthony Cronin
whom I first met was I was fifteen and the remarkable Sheila
Fitzgerald – the subject of my latest novel, An Ark of
Light (New Island) – in whose caravan in Mayo I first
read aloud my early poems, when I was eighteen and she was seventy-three.
This small piece from the Irish Independent is about the great
benediction of having met her.
|
See the associated article, Dermot Bolger reflects
on his friendship with Sheila Fitzgerald in Irish Independent
(9 Sept. 2018) - as attached.
|
Posted on Facebook (10.09.2018) - |
On the day David Marcus published my first short story in The
Irish Press in 1976, when I was still a schoolboy in Finglas,
I remember dreaming that one day I might publish a collection
of stories. I had no idea what my future held, but I never imagined
that it would take me another forty-four years to get around
to fulfilling my ambition. In fairness to myself, there were
interruptions to the process that got in the way, in the form
of fourteen novels, two collaborative novels, seventeen plays,
ten collections of poetry and three decades of wasting my Friday
evenings making runs into the box, on a succession of muddy
pitches, waiting for the perfect ball to arrive for a diving
header, that was only delivered courtesy of my grown son just
after my fiftieth birthday when I could finally retire.
However now, forty-four years later, this debut book of
stories which I dreamt about as a schoolboy will finally be
published by New Island under the title, Secrets Never Told,
with this handsome cover. It doesn’t contain the story
that David Marcus published back in 1976 but it does contain
a story about Roger Casement which David published in what was
probably the last anthology he ever edited. “The Faber
Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, 2006-07”. I have
a precious memory of having the privilege of going to meet him
in Wynn’s Hotel to discuss some edits to that story, and
finding this elegantly dressed elderly gentleman patiently waiting
on the front steps, umbrella and leather gloves in hand, smiling
shyly in greeting. Following a stroke David was starting
to have problems with his memory even then, but I remember his
ability to still utterly focus on the story and make small suggestions
with the same insight he had shown in his first letter to me
in 1976.
Like their author, and like many another Irish XI before
them, the eleven stories in Secrets Never Told have all undergone
varied journeys. Many were commissioned by BBC Radio 4 with
every strict word counts and it has been fascinating to use
these last months of lockdown to rewrite them and watch them
find their natural length, with the characters finally having
space to breathe. Hopefully the blurb below written by New Island
gives a sense of what I have been waiting forty-four years to
say, if anyone wants to check out the book when it appears in
September:
“A daughter searches a foreign city for her missing
father, hoping to uncover the secret behind his disappearance.
A widow tries to hunt down an unknown woman who secretly leaves
flowers on her husband’s grave, tormented by doubts they
cause about her past. A former lover of Roger Casement standing
among crowds at his state funeral, paying silent homage to the
secret world they were forced to inhabit. A novelist at a book
launch is confronted by the only other person aware of the secret
behind his success. Another writer is summoned to visit a dying
stranger who seems convinced they have spent their lives locked
in bitter rivalry. A child is randomly knocked down outside
the home of a woman who seems powerless to prevent her garden
wall being transformed into a permanent shrine.
These intricate and subtle short fictions by a master
storyteller peer under the veneer of our lives, delve into the
secrets that bind relationships together or tears them apart,
and create worlds where people discover how nothing about their
past is truly certain. There are always truths just beyond reach
that would make sense of their lives if they only knew how to
unlock them.” s, when I was eighteen and she was seventy-three.
This small piece from the Irish Independent is about the great
benediction of having met her.
|
Note : The messages is illustrated by
the cover of Secrets Never Told [2020]; Facebook, 06.08.2020.
|
[ top ]
References
Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares & Brendan Kennelly,
eds., Irelands Women (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994),
incls. selection.
There is a production of The Parting Glass by axisBallymun
at
YouTube [online;
accessed 29.06.2011]. |
Colin Smythe (publisher)
catalogue lists Bolger, ed., The Dolmen Book of Irish Christmas Stories;
Internal Exiles; note also rep. Dermot Bolger, Nightshift (Penguin 1993),
144pp.
[ top ]
Poems in The Inherited Boundaries:
Younger Poets of the Republic of Ireland, ed. Sebastian Barry
(Dolmen 1986) |
from The Habit of Flesh |
|
The Womans Daughter Captain of a Space
Ship |
101
103 |
from Finglas Lilies |
|
The Country Girl Finglas Lilies
The Singer |
106
108
110 |
from No Waiting America |
|
My Head Buried Stardust Sequence |
111
111 |
from Internal Exiles |
|
The Man Who Stepped out of Feeling Amsterdam
The Ghosts in the Ark Scarecrow Frankenstein
in the Markets Bluebells for Grainne, 1966
Dublin Girl, Mountjoy, 1984 Snuff Movies |
114
114
115
116
116
117
118
119 |
University of Ulster Library holds The Bright
Wave [PB 1353 B9]; Invisible Dublin, ed. Dermot Bolger [TRL 820.8]; Night
Shift [JORD 823.91].
[ top ]
Notes
The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989), adapted for stage by
Wet Paint in Project Theatre, 1989; Edinburgh Festival, Arthur Cleary
Productions, 1990; BBC Radio 4, 1990; Irish Tour, by Arthur Cleary Prod.;
Scottish Tour, by 7: 84; New York, Irish Arts Centre, 1992; Samuel Beckett
Award; Stewart Parker Award; BBC Award, and Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Award.
Invisible Dublin: A Journey through Dublins
Suburbs (1991), is an attempt to chronicle the lives of
the new Dubliners in the new Dublin as it has been lived by them
(Introduction; p.10.)
Temptation (2000), novel set in holiday
hotel in souther Ireland; Alison Alison Gill, 39, is left alone with the
children while her husband Peadar, a school principal, returns to Dublin
to deal with a crisis arising from the planned school extension; Chris
Conway, her former boyfriend, is coming to terms with the death of his
wife and children and staying in the same hotel. Reviewing, Bernice Harrison
laments that the central characters are so dreary its hard to care
whether or not they succomb to any sort of temptation and questions whether
the challenge of such a title can be met. (The Irish Times, Paperback
notes [q.d.].)
An Ark of Light (2918) - blurp: There
is one thing you must never lose sight of. No matter what life deals you,
promise me that you will strive tooth and nail for the right to be happy.
Having surrendered her happiness to raise her children, Eva Fitzgerald
defies convention in 1950s Ireland by leaving a failed marriage to embark
on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. It takes her from teeming
Moroccan streets and being flour-bombed in radical marches in London to
living in old age in a caravan that becomes an ark for all those whom
she befriends amid the fields of Mayo. An indefatigable idealist, Eva
strives to forge her identity while entangled in the fault-lines of her
childrens unravelling lives. An Ark of Light is a devastating portrayal
of a mothers anxiety for her gay son in a world where homosexuality
is illegal and explores a terse relationship between a mother and daughter
with nothing in common beyond love. Remarkably affecting and gorgeously
rendered, this standalone novel completes the real-life story of the unforgettable
heroine of Bolgers bestselling novel, The Family on Paradise
Pier, in following a free spirit trying to hold her family together
while striving to be happy. This struggle is often heartbreakingly lost,
but Eva never loses her indomitable spirit. A towering achievement by
one of Irelands best-loved authors about the unshakeable bonds of
family, the indestructability of love and the price a woman pays for the
right to be herself. (Post by author on Facebook, 22.08.2018.)
Warp effect: John Walshe, Ed. Corr. of Irish
Independent, declares that Paul Durcans Raven collection Jesus,
Breaks His Fall [sic], should be banned from all schools; Eileen Fox,
PRO of CBS Parents Council called it extremely offensive.
[&c.]. See Bolger gives an account of the founding of Raven Arts,
in How Poetry Warps the Mind, Sunday Independent, Living
& Leisure, 9L (8 Dec. 1994).
Northside: New Writers Press was initially
printed at Dorset Street, Dublin - see Augustus Young, On Loaning Hill
(1972) [COPAC ref.].
Ulysses adaptation: In 1994 Dermot
Bolger was commissioned by the Rosenbach Museum (which holds Joyce’s original
manuscript of Ulysses) to adapt the novel Ulysses for the
stage as the centrepiece of Philadelphia's celebration of the 90th Bloomsday.
A Dublin Bloom is the text of that commission, a dramatic dream-like recreation
of Mr. Blooms journey through that most significant Dublin day.
The original production was directed by Greg Doran at the Annenberg Centre,
the University of Pennsylvania, USA, on June 16th, 1994. (See Dermot
Bolger website - Dublin Bloom online;
accessed 15.11.2012.)
Cf. Bolger's Irish Times account: One
Monday evening in 1993 the English theatre director Greg Doran, of the
Royal Shakespeare Company, phoned to say that he had recently staged
Derek Walcotts acclaimed version of the Odyssey and wanted to
follow it with a stage version of James Joyces Ulysses.
/ I explained why I would never attempt this near-impossible task. [...]
As Greg departed for London I stood outside the restaurant, feeling
palpable terror, because in explaining how it couldnt be done
I had somehow agreed to transpose Joyces masterpiece of 265,000
words – in 18 episodes, alternating through a dazzling array of linguistic
styles – into a play, due to have a staged reading in a 1,300-seat Philadelphia
theatre the following Bloomsday. (Staging Ulysses,
in The Irish Times, 17 Oct. 2012, Weekend; for full text version,
see Library > Reviews via index
or as attached.)
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