Other People's Lives

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.

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 best-selling 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