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- Herausgeber: New Island
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Every night during a year spent in lockdown, Dermot Bolger set out on long walks through deserted streets, armed only with a pen and paper. Bolger follows in the footsteps of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, using walks through his native city to allow his imagination free rein to revisit pivotal moments in his own life and speculatively meditate on the lives of others in a series of remarkable poems. The book starts with his parents honeymooning in a wartime Wicklow orchard and ends, eight decades later, as the poet dances with his partner in a Wicklow field. In between we encounter Nuala O'Faolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett, defiant in her lonely final years; Herbert Simms, Dublin's brilliant, tragically overworked housing architect; and Patricia Lynch, writing The Turf-Cutter's Donkey in one room while her husband wrote communist tracts in the next. Interlaced with such real lives are imagined ones – a hardened criminal detailing prison life in haikus, a doppelganger exploring alternative pasts for the author. Taken together, these poems chart a dazzling constellation of experiences.
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Author photograph © Brian Meade
Born in Dublin in 1959, the novelist, playwright and poet Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best-known writers. His fourteen novels include The Journey Home, A Second Life, Tanglewood, The Lonely Sea and Sky and An Ark of Light. In 2020 he published his first collection of short stories, Secrets Never Told. His debut play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, received the Samuel Beckett Award. His numerous other plays include The Ballymun Trilogy, charting forty years of life in a Dublin working-class suburb; and most recently, Last Orders at the Dockside and an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, both staged by the Abbey Theatre. His ninth poetry collection, The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss, appeared in 2012. He devised the bestselling collaborative novels Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel, and edited numerous anthologies, including The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. A former Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Bolger writes for Ireland’s leading newspapers, and in 2012 was named Commentator of the Year at the NNI Journalism Awards. In 2021 he received The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.
dermotbolger.com
OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES
By the same author
Poetry
The Habit of Flesh
Finglas Lilies
No Waiting America
Internal Exiles
Leinster Street Ghosts
Taking My Letters back
The Chosen Moment
External Affairs
The Venice Suite
That Which is Suddenly Precious
Novels
Night Shift
The Woman’s Daughter
The Journey Home
Emily’s Shoes
A Second Life
Father’s Music
Temptation
The Valparaiso Voyage
The Family on Paradise Pier
The Fall of Ireland
Tanglewood
The Lonely Sea and Sky
An Ark of Light
Young Adult Novel
New Town Soul
Short Stories
Secrets Never Told
Collaborative Novels
Finbar’s Hotel
Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel
Plays
The Lament for Arthur Cleary
Blinded by the Light
In High Germany
The Holy Ground
One Last White Horse
April Bright
The Passion of Jerome
Consenting Adults
The Ballymun Trilogy
1: From These Green Heights
2: The Townlands of Brazil
3: The Consequences of Lightning
Walking the Road
The Parting Glass
Tea Chests & Dreams
Ulysses (a stage adaptation of the novel by James Joyce)
Bang Bang
Last Orders at the Dockside
The Messenger
OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES
First published in 2022 by
New Island Books
Glenshesk House
10 Richview Office Park
Clonskeagh
Dublin D14 V8C4
Republic of Ireland
www.newisland.ie
Copyright © Dermot Bolger, 2022
Print ISBN: 978–1–84840–843–2
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84840–844–9
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by New Island Books
Photographs in this book are © Dermot Bolger
Cover image © Peter O’Doherty
New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíonn). Dublin, Ireland.
New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.
For Diarmuid and Donnacha, and for Helen.
Contents
I Begin Again
The Unguarded Moment
Heron and Poet
II One Life
The Valley Hotel, Woodenbridge, 1944
The Broken Bread Van
Found Poems in Telegrams and Letters
My Teacher Recites a William Allingham Poem
The Night Bakery
Loneliness
How Other People Pass Their Days
Written in a Church in Arezzo
Never So Close
Sunday Walk
Letting Go: Four Poems
1. The Dead
2. Letting Go
3. Ten Years On
4. The Residents’ Lounge
Nocturne Variations
Red Balloons Carried Over a Railway Bridge
III Other People’s Lives
Nuala O’Faolain on a Bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge
Fairground Ponies
On Hearing of the Death of Dermot Healy
The Novelist at Ninety-Three
A Tram Stop in Eastern Europe
A Sonnet for Isabella Lucinda Bright
A Woman’s Handwritten Note
The Monday Men
Sydney and Gladys
The Corporation Housing Architect
The Street Photographer
Matsuo Bashō in Mountjoy Prison
My Eyes
A Poet of the 1970s
The Slant
Making Things Happen
The Town Carried in his Head
Civil War
Men as Old as the Century
Joseph Mary Plunkett’s Rosary Beads
After Grace
IV An Evening Walk
1. The Gift of Boredom
2. Eden Terrace
3. An Empty Laneway
4. The Stammer
5. The Park
6. Pessoa Walks Through Dublin
7. A Poem for Patricia Lynch
V A New Life
Yellow Fields of Anastasia
Music in My Golden Years
Your True Height
The Dancers in a Wicklow Field
Acknowledgements
Other People’s Lives
IBegin Again
