Drawing the lines

30 August 2006
test

Dermot Bolger edits a new anthology of poems and stories
from residents of south Co Dublin, who share their bittersweet reminiscences on the subject of home. By Erik Salholm

County lines. Edited by Dermot Bolger. Published by New Island Books, €10.95

In the introduction to County Lines, the novelist Dermot Bolger tells of a happy period spent in the employ of South Dublin County Council as a writer-in-residence. Bolger has edited a number of anthologies but this one is special.

County Lines collects the thoughts of residents, past and present, in areas such as Clondalkin, Tallaght, Templeogue and Rathfarnham about the meaning of "home". The short pieces are arranged by area, chronologically, and prose pieces are interspersed with poetry.

Bolger describes the anthology as "a series of snapshots of a changing Ireland and of how any city anywhere constantly changes and renews itself". It certainly gives a vivid impression of the city's voracious appetite for the landscape and little villages around its outskirts.

It is necessarily partial, and it does not attempt to be comprehensive; not every area in south Co Dublin is represented. Bolger worked with respondents to his newspaper ads, some well-known and others unknown. It was a good way to go, as the contributors give themselves with great generosity to the task of describing their lives.

Meditating on the meaning of home, the collection asks: what does it mean to set down roots in a place? When does an immigrant stop feeling like an outsider and begin to see themselves as part of a society?

The answer here varies. One woman describes how she felt isolated from her neighbours, who had moved en masse from the city centre, until her little girl went missing and they all helped look for her. Another, who moved to Tallaght from Birr, feels that she is only truly at home in the country and that the city is always a slightly awkward fit.

The question of belonging is particularly pertinent today as Irish society grapples with issues of social cohesion and immigration. Bolger acknowledges that were this book to be published in a few years it would feature many voices from eastern Europe and Africa.

Many of the local writers who contributed to County Lines moved into new houses in new developments. Depressingly, the problems they faced then – lack of amenities, poor-quality housing, infrastructure lagging behind development – persist in urban planning in Ireland today.

Áine Lyons talks about moving her family back to Dublin from London in the early 1970s and the long, painful process of building a neighbourhood there. "As our area started to gel and become a community, other estates were opening up in west Tallaght with very few buses and no shops. So lessons were not learned." At the same time, there is joy, engagement, the forging of friendships and the rearing of families. And there is beauty, as in Patricia Moran's and Bríd Ní Uallacháin's odes to the sensual pleasures of Tymon Park.

Many of the short pieces in this anthology are redolent with grief and guilt. New people in a new land, the writers express the feeling that they were responsible for destroying what was beautiful about the landscape they colonised.

In the first piece, Tony Higgins describes the peculiar alchemy of modernisation in Clondalkin. A pond becomes a supermarket car-park. A field where he once played football becomes a bustling school. Open vistas become gridlock.

Phyllis McCarthy's beautiful recollections of an idyllic semi-rural childhood are inseparable from an intense feeling of sorrow and loss. "Field after field fell before the excavator and the bulldozer," she writes. This is not the melancholy of nostalgia that Friel says spins all memory into gold, but sharp pain.

"We – who could not foretell that the last harvest was being reaped – forgot that year to mourn its passing. Had we foreseen that something so different had begun, perhaps we would have been more appreciative."

Poetry sits beside the plainest prose and is all the more brilliant for it, and insights hide in unlikely places, such as Brian Kirk's observation that the pubs in Clondalkin village may have kept their names, but they have utterly changed.

One of the emerging themes from this anthology is that people do not necessarily want newness. In a sense, in fact, they want its opposite. They value most the sense of connection that only comes with time. It is hard to imagine how difficult it must be – and feel – for a young family to come to a new place, literally and figuratively, and try to give it a soul, but it is important for us to try. For this reason, County Lines is a valuable and timely anthology.

Many of these short pieces are nostalgic for old things, ways and people because they hold a place together and give it meaning. These meanings overlap in time, in the contributors' memories and accounts, through natural and man-made changes to the topography. All the contributors from south Co Dublin are proud of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains that have overlooked settlements there from earliest times and Joan Byrne is not alone in ruefully half-admiring the harsh wind that blows down off their peaks.

Dardis Clarke, Austin Clarke's youngest son, gives a remarkable, strange account of his father's settlement in Templeogue. He moved there for the peace and quiet, though not entirely on his own terms. His mother bought his house and it grated against him that he never owned it. Dardis Clarke recounts the salon his father held on Sunday afternoons and the way Clarke's peace was eroded by the area's development. "Clarke was surrounded," he writes. "The village life was over."

Geraldine Mills says, "Ours were lives that didn't make the headlines." Most lives don't and there is something important here about acknowledging – and even honouring – the experiences of ordinary people. Bolger writes, "As a young writer... it took me years to have the confidence to realise that my life and the lives of the people around me were a valid and important theme for literature." So they are.

Bolger says County Lines is for anyone interested in the Irish suburban experience. That sounds like faint praise for this , stimulating book, full of arresting details and moving writing. The change Ireland has experienced in the last 50 years has been dramatised in our capital. This book is for anyone who cares about that change.

Under the Shadow of Birds. By Maria Wallace

(Taken from County Lines)

Black birds –

she thinks they are ravens –

hover over her

for the past eighteen years.

Their coarse croaking cries

drown all other sounds;

dark plumage shines

as they circle around

ready to destroy

the little she still has: