Abstract
This article explores how Dermot Healy’s writing bridges the gap between the imagined and material dimensions of the Atlantic coastline, offering a distinctive “coastal imaginary” rooted in both lived experience and mythic resonance. In addition to examining how Healy draws upon mythological, biblical, and folkloric traditions to portray the coast as a liminal space of mystery, memory, and transcendence, it also analyses—through close readings of his references to Hy-Brazil and meditations on stone wall-building and geological time—how Healy’s coastal life connected him to the physical realities of erosion, climate, and deep time, grounding his imaginative vision in the tactile and temporal textures of place. Overall, the study argues that Healy’s coastline is neither romanticised nor purely symbolic; rather, it emerges as a volatile, dynamic threshold where land and sea, past and present, dream and material reality converge. In doing so, Healy articulates a coastal imaginary that embraces uncertainty, fluidity and the enduring presence of the inexpressible.
Introduction
When, in 1989, the Irish writer Dermot Healy (1947–2014) bought a cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on Sligo’s Maugherow Peninsula, a local man could not believe his ears. “Sure that place is falling into the sea,” the man told Healy. “There hasn’t been a soul in that house for years. You don’t want to be going up there.” 1 Healy decided to take his chances and ended up living out the rest of his life on that precarious headland. Still, the local man’s warnings were not unfounded, not least because they came at a time when the world was waking up to the stark possibility of large stretches of the coastline being swept into the sea. In 1988, the United Nations had endorsed the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), marking a long-overdue acknowledgement that human activity was altering the climate and damaging the planet. A primary concern was rising sea levels, which, as scientific research warned, threatened to submerge coastlines, displace populations, and disrupt ecosystems to devastating effect.
It is an environmental concern, among many others, that has not gone away, of course, and what had once been seen as the domain of scientists and policymakers has also rightly become a major research area for the humanities. This shift reflects a growing recognition that our understanding of the ocean is shaped not only by science but by the cultural narratives that frame it. As part of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey terms the “oceanic turn,” scholars have begun to trace how the degradation of coastal and marine environments is deeply entangled with historical and literary representations that cast the ocean as an unknowable, formless mass, a mere backdrop or “stage for human history” rather than a material reality in its own right. 2 In this context, Serpil Oppermann has aptly described the ocean’s dual condition as both a “physical geographical site and a vast domain of imagination that can never be conclusively charted.” 3
In the age of GPS satellites capable of mapping landed areas to centimetre-level precision, it is startling to think that 71% of the Earth’s surface remains largely unknown, and, in many ways, dismissed as a formless abyss. Christopher Connery argues that a general uninterest in uncovering the ocean’s material reality is natural: “It is not surprising that humanity, a terrestrial species, should have terrestrial forms of thought, forms that in the encounter with the maritime world would find a scene of negation, radical otherness, or utopian or dystopian release”. 4 This supposed cognitive distancing or abstraction of the ocean’s material reality is arguably more easily achieved, however, by those who can remain at a spatial remove from the ocean and blissfully unaware of its rhythms, turbulences and encroachments. But what of the people like Healy, whose everyday life when he came to live on the Maugherow Peninsula was shaped by his proximity to the ocean? For such individuals, the ocean cannot remain a distant abstraction or purely symbolic space; it is an immediate, volatile presence—a force that erodes the land, alters the weather, and permeates their daily rhythms and imaginations. Healy’s writing offers a compelling entry point into this coastal imaginary, where lived experience and symbolic meaning intertwine, and where the boundary between land and sea becomes not just a physical edge but a space of layered meaning, negotiation and vulnerability. At a time in the late twentieth century when the world was awakening to the vulnerability of coastal communities to the mounting threats posed by climate change and environmental degradation, Healy’s move to a headland in Sligo positions him as a writer who can help us appreciate the intimate and complex ways in which human identity, memory, and storytelling are shaped by—and in turn shape—these fragile borderlands.
To make this argument, I will begin by tracing Healy’s childhood encounters with waterways through to his mature vision of the Atlantic coastline. I will contend that Healy draws upon mythological, biblical and folkloric traditions to portray the coast as a liminal space of mystery and transcendence, a threshold to the Otherworld. Using the example of the mythical island of Hy-Brazil, the discussion will then explore the extent to which coastal dwellers perceive and seek to preserve the ocean as an imaginative refuge: a realm, unlike the gridded certainty of land, that still permits mythology, wonder and the sense of the inexpressible. The second half of the essay will shift focus to the physical realities of coastal life in Healy’s work. Drawing on his meditations on stone wall-building as a defence against erosion, as well as his depictions of the movement of fossils within deep geological time, I will argue that Healy’s representations of the coastline are neither romantic nor reductive; rather they are at once grounded in the textures of lived experience and adrift in the rhythms of memory, dream, and myth. In this way, a particular coastal imaginary is posed in which the edge of the land becomes not merely a site of transition, but a mode of perception suspended between the real and the imagined, the past and present, the mundane and the mythic.
Healy’s Imagined Coastline
Though eventually settling in a cottage daringly pitched above the Atlantic, Dermot Healy is, in many ways, not an obvious choice when seeking writers to articulate a coastal imaginary. Born in the landlocked county of Westmeath in 1947 and later moving to Cavan Town during childhood, Healy spent much of his adult life in urban centres, cities like London and Belfast, far removed from the remote coastal community where he would eventually settle at the age of forty-two. Given this largely inland existence, however, it is worth considering how his earlier environments and imaginative outlets may have shaped his eventual perception of the coastline.
One such proving ground for his perception of the phenomenal world was itself a waterway: Lough Kinale, a freshwater lake spanning the borders of Longford, Westmeath, and Cavan, where Healy fished with his father. Though many miles from the sea—almost equidistant from Ireland’s east and west coastlines—Kinale cultivated in him a lifelong preoccupation with things unseen and ineffable. “It has the strangest underwater you have ever seen,” he writes in his memoir The Bend for Home (1996). “The bottom one minute is sandy and only a couple of feet away. Then it’s green and swirling and six feet away. And then with a race to the heart you row over nothing. That nothingness can scare people. I’ve known a man in the horrors oar for shore when it happened. That stretch of water was too much for him.” 5 Here, as with Healy’s later perception of the Atlantic, the water poses both physical and mental concerns. On one level, the older man’s panic when rowing over deep water is a literal, practical response to sudden disorientation. But on another, Healy gestures toward something more metaphysical: a confrontation with the unknown, the formless, the sublime. The abrupt transition from solid ground to vertiginous depth evokes a quiet existential unease, suggesting that water—even in its inland, domesticated form—can provoke profound emotional and imaginative responses.
Lough Kinale, Lough Sheelin (another lake from his youth), and the Atlantic Ocean of Healy’s later years in Sligo become, in his imagination, interchangeable sites of mystery, wonder, and fear. “In later life I made Sheelin into the Atlantic,” Healy writes. “Kinale, I’ve never got to the bottom of.” 6 Alongside Healy’s personal experiences, his imaginative visions of these bodies of water were also undoubtedly steeped in longstanding cultural and symbolic associations with the sea. As Alain Corbin argues, the sea, up until the mideighteenth century, repulsed rather than attracted us, largely due to ancient narratives depicting it as a realm of chaotic and malevolent forces. In Genesis, for example, the sea, in contrast to the orderliness of land and civilisation, is a frenzied, formless mass that signals the incomplete nature of Creation. “Since Creation was organised around the appearance of man, who was both its goal and its focus, this vestige without form remained alien to him,” Corbin writes. “A creature fashioned in the image of God would never make his abode outside the garden or the city.” 7 This association between the sea and divine punishment finds one of its clearest expressions in the story of the Flood, where the waters rise not only as a natural phenomenon but as a vehicle of judgment and destruction: “Its roaring, its moaning, its sudden bursts of anger were perceived as so many reminders of the sins of the first humans, doomed to be engulfed by the waves.” 8
In a similar vein, Healy’s depictions of the coastline often describe a threshold between worlds, where the tangible gives way to the vast plane of the unknown—an unknown of Otherworldly might. In A Goat’s Song (1994), the Atlantic is described as carrying a wind that “whipped the breath out of the bodies of the girls when they ran outside for turf”, leaving the fishermen, after a long haul on its surface, “like zombies”, and “sending waters flooding into [Jack’s] consciousness”. 9 Similarly, in Long Time, No See (2011), the sea is “leaping like a suicide over the lava rocks” before it conducts a biblical storm that “scoured clean” the beach, “dragged down the boulder clay” and revealed an “ancient stone wall”. 10 In this imaginary, people on the coastline are at the mercy of oceanic forces that are at once elemental and symbolic, forces that shape not only the physical environment but the psychological lives of its dwellers. The sea presses in on people, leaving them seemingly dumbstruck in the wake of its primordial power. But they do not protest or try to predict its mood. They simply get on with their lives, hoping, in ways, to remain in its good graces. “It’s got secrets that shouldn’t be told,” Healy writes of Kinale, as if any attempt to unravel its mysteries is to side with something dangerous, even sacrilegious. 11
If Healy’s recourse to religious and mythological themes when depicting coastal life suggests that stories inform our sense of place, it is also equally true, of course, that place informs the stories we tell and the writer’s sensibilities. Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper make the salient point that Healy’s writing evokes a general sense of the unsolidity of material reality, an atmosphere in which time, space and even identity seem subject to continual fluctuations. 12 Arguably, this is most obviously a symptom of the disillusionment felt by many of his fictional characters, most of whom have lost faith in their ability to navigate and name the world around them. But what Tess Gallagher calls the “sea-strangeness” that Healy began to exhibit after moving to his Sligo cottage also undoubtedly influenced his ways of seeing and expressing. 13 Searching for a language to explain both his characters’ and his own bafflement, the ever-shifting and perceivably formless nature of the sea often functions as an objective correlative, a symbolic embodiment, for the lingering sense that something essential about our existence remains inexpressible, or, at least, palely expressed by linear, monological narrative systems. For example, in A Goat’s Song, there is a moment when Jack Ferris, after spending time in a library reading “old mariners’ maps and local history books” and feeling as if he is slipping into “a non-world,” gets into his car and drives to the coast, as if unconsciously drawn to this liminal space.
He got into the Lada and sat a moment with the steering wheel in his hands. He was not sure whether he could any longer drive a car. Then he switched the engine on. He drove very slowly to a beach, fearing that any moment his sense of what lay to his left and right would suddenly be removed. He stopped the car on a bed of gravel, and with relief headed towards the breaking surf.
14
Much like Stephen Dedalus walking Sandymount Strand in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Jack seems drawn to the beach as an arena of contemplation and perhaps as a means of cleansing: an attempt to wash away, if only metaphorically, his growing anxieties. Having begun to think in “the eerie language of the half-formed and the unsayable”, the intertidal zone appears to him as a metaphysical frontier, where the structured world gives way to the wordless and infinite ocean. 15 “Six or seven leagues represent for man the radius of the infinite,” Baudelaire once said, and for Jack, having experienced something close to aphasia in the library, the sea’s infinite abyss promises to lift the burden of articulation, the need to express himself through structured logic and solid, nameable things. 16 There is a sense of surrender. Like Stephen Dedalus before him, Jack seems comforted by the idea that he might be walking towards, or flirting with, a kind of eternity, a dissolution of self, a space where all things solid begin to melt, and the pressures of identity, language, and social expectation can be momentarily suspended. In many ways, Jack’s impulse is a familiar one. Jonathan Raban notes how, under the influence of Romanticism, the seaside began to transform into a space of refuge and introspection: to go to the sea was to “still feel small and alone in the vastness of Creation. . . to escape from the city and the machine, and from regulated and repetitive patterns of life in a complex industrial society.” 17
This abiding sense that we treat the sea as an elusive, metaphorical concept as much as a material reality is comically emphasised when Jack is joined at the beach by two strangers, an old man, described as “a stooped creature with a broken wing,” and a ghostly girl who remains mute, when mistakenly believing that Jack wants her to marvel at the sea. 18
“Look,” he shouted, “at the seal.” The girl followed his outstretched arm. “The seal! The seal!” shouted Jack. She looked out, but by then the seal had gone. She looked back at Jack and ran away. “I fear,” said the old fellow, “that she thought you were shouting: ‘Look at the sea! Look at the sea!’” “Oh,” said Jack.
19
While a seal is noteworthy—worthy of pointing out—the sea itself is seemingly not. Indeed, the girl appears to find Jack’s supposed attempt to draw her attention to the sea so absurd that she runs away in fear. Unlike the fleeting presence of the seal, the sea’s omnipresence and vastness might be said to render it almost invisible as it blends into the background of human perception as an enduring constant rather than a singular, remarkable phenomenon. Or is it that the sea resists being pointed to, not because it lacks physical presence, but because it exists more readily as an idea than as an object? Perhaps the sea is something sensed, intuited or imagined rather than simply seen. John Carey argues that a characteristic of the Irish mythological Otherworld, whether reached through a holy well, a lake or the sea, is that it appears immanent everywhere and alluringly accessible, yet remains a world out of proportion with our own. 20 Similarly, Healy’s coastlines operate within and beyond our conceptions of time and space. We can reach these frontiers. We can flirt with their edges. And we can sense the dissolution of time and space across their limits. But it simultaneously begins to defy easy understanding or containment within familiar ways of seeing the world. Hence, when Jack attempts to walk away from the beach, he is drawn back again, seemingly spellbound by its pull.
A few minutes later, as Jack was crossing the field behind the beach, it happened a second time. Just when he had forgotten, the same mental gap opened again. But this time the wrench was longer and more frightening, for now all natural things – grass, birdsong and sea air – were becoming objects of horror. He went back to the beach and lay down on his back. His heart was beating furiously [. . .] The walk to the car which was only a few hundred yards away seemed like miles. His wrists became itchy. He rubbed them fiercely. A knuckle on his spine started to throb. He started the car. Every mile or so it cut out. The people he saw on the road home he imagined nude, squatting over a bowl to shit. This is normal, he said, there is nothing wrong in seeing that. 21
Along with exploring the navel-gazing tendencies of his characters and their desire to make sense of themselves in a vast and shifting world, Healy is tapping into a collective cultural consciousness in which the coastline becomes a gateway to dimensions both familiar and strange. A journey towards the coast is a pursuit, consciously or unconsciously, of an in-between state in which time seems to loosen its grip, space becomes fluid, and the imagination threatens to assume power over material reality. Yet Healy is also able to ground any takeover by the forces of myth, memory and mystery in the plain duties and objects of lived experience. For example, when Jack Ferris fishes off the Mayo coast, the labour of hauling nets is rendered in precise, practical detail, revealing a tactile connection to the sea’s mysteries:
First the net came through the winch where Thady freed it of fish. Behind him the others drew it into two piles, cleaning it as they went of seaweed and gravel. It came up trailing extraordinary vegetation. A dark green stench from the bed of the ocean filled the boat. 22
This physical engagement with marine life merges seamlessly with the imaginative pull of the sea. The crew are fishing near Inishglora, an island tied to Brendan the Navigator’s spiritual quest and the mournful saga of the Children of Lir. Such associations infuse the scene with a mythic undertone, creating a narrative that shifts between material and imagined dimensions, between the ordinary and the transcendent:
The boat slopped in the silence. It seemed they had lost touch with human kind. Then, like a voice from hell, some message crackled across the radio. 23
Here, the radio’s faltering signal hints at a reconnection with land and civilisation, yet its distortion underscores how language—and by extension, human systems of meaning—struggle to assert themselves in a space governed by elemental forces and ancient narratives. The coastline thus emerges as a threshold where familiar frameworks of understanding dissolve, giving way to a more instinctual, symbolic, and at times uncanny mode of perception.
Of course, as scholars have noted, the sea, like any vast phenomenon, is difficult to describe without recourse to abstraction and metaphor. DeLoughrey argues that “unlike terrestrial space—where one might memorialise a space into place—the perpetual circulation of ocean currents means that the sea dissolves phenomenological experience and diffracts the accumulation of narrative”. 24 Where land allows for continuity and stability, offering an anchor for identity and narrative, the ocean’s ceaseless movement and apparent formlessness unsettle these processes. Connery poses: “Perhaps the oceanic, as close an approximation of the infinite as the visible, physical world can provide, requires some of the abstraction that is ‘space’, its existence being somehow between place and space, but inadequately described by either term”. 25 The ocean’s case is also not helped by the fact that our scientific and geographic knowledge of it lags far behind our understanding of the land. For instance, Seabed 2030, a project launched in 2017 to map the entire ocean floor by the end of the decade, was initiated at a time when only 6% of the seafloor had been charted to a satisfactory resolution. 26
This being said, Healy’s writing suggests that, in veiled and perhaps unconscious ways, people want to preserve this vast, unmapped expanse as a kind of playground for the imagination. In this realm, the limits of knowledge give way to the possibilities of myth, memory, and dream. Healy provides a compelling illustration of this desire when dreaming of the island of Hy Brazil in The Bend for Home. Though widely recognised as mythical, Hy Brazil was mapped at various locations along the west coast of Ireland for over five hundred years before it eventually disappeared from nautical maps in the late nineteenth century.
27
Nevertheless, Healy, hungover in his mother’s home in Cavan, begins to dream of the island rising out of the ocean close to his Sligo home. He writes, “If I close my eyes I think I can see Hy Brazil, a little beyond Inishmurray Island, not exactly land, not even someplace eternal, but a place imagined by people long before me that I must imagine in my turn”.
28
Healy’s sense that he has an obligation to continue this lineage of imagining, to sustain the island’s mythic presence through the act of storytelling, is intriguing. In doing so, he positions imagination not as an escape from reality but as a mode of inheritance, a way of honouring the perceptual and narrative visions through which coastal communities have made sense of the sea’s elusive presence. Barbara Freitag, who conducted the first thorough survey of Hy Brazil’s geographic and cultural representations, found that the island has been seen, among other things, as a Celtic Elysium, a sunken island, a utopian paradise and a haven of economic riches.
29
Along with illustrating the variance of its supposed geographic position, shape and size throughout its cartographic history, Freitag showed, in other words, that the island, which is said to rise from the Atlantic every seven years, has represented whatever anyone wanted it to represent. As Healy writes: Like a star that appears say once every two hundred years, you watch for Hy Brazil every seven years but in truth it has no definite orbit, no mathematics can accurately predict its appearance at a definite hour on a definite day. But you want to be there when it happens. Even if it never happened. Even if it never existed, you wish it into being. You wish for the language to recover it from the void.
30
This longing for Hy Brazil—the desire to pull something nebulous from the void—extends beyond Healy’s personal meditations and speaks to a broader cultural tendency to make the sea a site of imaginative projection for those living on the coastline. He suggests that we seek these spaces that defy certainty and material confines, serving as lacunas for the imagination: “It’s not the island that rises out of the sea but the observer out of the torpor of the everyday,” he writes. 31
Hy Brazil is, of course, just one of countless mythical islands imprinted in the local and global consciousness. We are familiar with the stories of Atlantis, the Elysian Fields and the Isles of the Blest, to name a few. Many of these islands embody deep psychological or societal desires, such as the need for hope, mystery or cautionary tales. In a more pragmatic sense, however, these imagined places were born out of the limitations of early navigation and cartography. In the era before satellites and GPS, explorers and mapmakers often relied on incomplete or second-hand accounts, blending observation with imagination. As Freitag argues, a distant glimpse of land shrouded in mist, a misunderstood tale from a sailor, or the optical illusion of a mirage could easily give rise to reports of undiscovered islands. 32 Once recorded on maps, these accounts gained a veneer of authority, perpetuating their existence and leading others to search for them. The uncharted globe became, in this way, a canvas for human hopes, fears and fantasies, transforming, among other things, the vast and mysterious seas into realms of storytelling.
Today, by contrast, we often delegate the mapping of our world to technology, relying on satellites, GPS, and digital tools. With this precision, the certainty of coordinates and the immediacy of virtual access, our sense of the world’s unknowability has arguably diminished. What was the awe-inspiring vastness of the earth has been reduced, thanks to technology, air travel and globalisation, to a more accessible and comprehensible network of destinations, shrinking the psychological and physical distances that once lent travel its aura of mystery and grandeur. Healy suggests, however, that the coastline still retains a sense of the unknown, a sense of an “out there” beyond what is measurable. In contrast to the gridded certainty of inland areas, the craggy, eroding, permeable boundaries of the coastlines are not boundaries at all as much as they are invitations to drift towards fears, desires and feats of the imagination that, for the coastal dweller, regularly usurp the rigidity of facts. In this case, the debunking of Hy Brazil’s material reality has not diminished and may have even strengthened the resolve of the coastal community to retain the island’s place in their imaginations. As Healy suggests, the coastline becomes a foundry and a storehouse for the imagination, where stories are forged from the curious meeting of land and sea, and where a sense of the Otherworld can seemingly be held, if only in memory and myth.
The fears of the storytellers are exaggerated in the tales. The unbelievable takes on a human presence. What has happened repeatedly turns into a ritual. What has not happened turns into the mystery. The island is peopled with our uncertainties. Peace is only allowed a certain passage of time before terror intrudes again.
So that is how it must be on Hy Brazil for those who live there, and how it must have been for the makers of Hy Brazil, the ones that dreamed it up and make it sink and make it rise. 33
Healy’s Material Coastline
To live on Healy’s coastline, then, is to dwell in the presence of profound mysteries: unexplored depths and unknowable forces that invite fear, awe and imaginative speculation. It is a liminal space: a threshold between this world and the Otherworld, between natural and supernatural forces, between past and present. Yet, importantly, Healy’s work complicates any purely symbolic reading of the coastline. He is acutely aware that treating the coast as a mere imaginative trope risks, in Patricia Yaeger’s terms, a destructive dissociation—an attitude that allows us to view the natural world as a passive, unchanging backdrop, an “inexhaustible storehouse of goods,” rather than as a “biotic world” teeming with agency. 34 In this way, his visions of the coast, though often steeped in mystery and myth, are also always grounded in a deep, embodied engagement with its material reality.
Healy’s life in Sligo afforded him a unique vantage point. The wildness of his home cannot be overstated. In “Ballyconnell Colours” (2002), he describes the sensation of the cottage transforming into a ship at night, with the driveway growing “taut as a mooring line that attaches us to the far mainland.” 35 Indeed, without electricity for many years and forever battered by the winds and rains of the Atlantic, Healy admits in the poem “Prayer” (1992) to occasionally wishing for a more settled existence: “Sometimes I am bewildered by all this foolish energy battering away miles from people,” he writes. “I envy those who live upriver at the quiet source. Here we are forever stepping between the incoming roar of life and the tides that carry death out.” 36
However, for all its instability, Healy seems to embrace the precariousness of coastal life, the sense that his house, and by extension himself, stands on the edge of the material world. Frances Byrnes remarks that Healy “seemed to thrive on peril, living right on the cusp, generating dangers he needn’t have.”
37
As Healy explains in his essay “Within an Ass’s Roar,” living inland promises a more peaceful relationship with the natural world, but it comes at the expense of missing out on its wildest and most primal utterances. Rather, Healy wants to be there to bear witness to and translate those rough conversations. If the next stop from Sligo is America, then the thousands of miles of ocean in between bear matters of great significance, both material and immaterial. Much like his welcome of the Barnacle geese to his coastline after their migration from Greenland, as told in A Fool’s Errand (2010), Healy seems to relish the idea of being stationed at this frontier, ready to greet the ocean’s arrivals and even to take the fullest hit of its rage: Whenever I stop inland I find there’s something missing. For a while I can’t place it. I think it’s the usual disorientation. Then I remember when I lie down in bed. It’s that sound. The gunshots. The slamming doors. The thumping. The boom on the lava rock. The powerful traffic that never stops.
38
Along with this psychological pull toward volatility, the dangers of the coast also compelled Healy into physical action, a continual engagement that saw him cultivate, shape and defend the land. For example, he went about renovating the cottage, planting crops, rearing animals and, most meaningfully, building walls as buttresses against the ocean’s erosion. These walls, both drystone walls set inland and gabion walls shoring up the headland, recur in his writing. In Long Time, No See, Psyche’s wall-building along the shoreline can be interpreted as a wordless means of communication with his lost friend and a family shielding him in the wake of tragedy. 39 But the act, for Psyche as for Healy in many poems, is also a means of connecting with the materiality of the place, the substrate that shapes and anchors his imagination, and makes him feel as though he is plugged into an atavistic understanding of the world:
This Northern buck who used to park his car at our gate and walk his children along the beach came up alongside me alone, and started carrying stones across to me; he said nothing, just stood by rock in hand, then when I gave a nod, bit by bit he’d drop the rock on the wall and I’d put her in place.
Soon we were at it together. I held one end of the string, he took the other, and we made a straight line. The wall was good. 40
Similarly, in A Fool’s Errand, Healy writes about the building of gabion walls as an act of tending rather than a symbolic gesture or an everyday necessity. But he also knows, of course, that it is all these things at once.
they are—not ambitions or works of wonder, not even chores, but plain dear labour I took on to shore up the beach against the storms; but the wall I built to keep the sea out is keeping me in amongst the pounding diction.
41
Despite the seeming disquiet of building walls that only offer a temporary reprieve, they serve as a mediator as much as a boundary between him and the sea, marking and integrating human presence in the face of forces that far exceed it. In other words, Healy does not build in defiance of the sea, but in dialogue with it, creating a form of coexistence. As Seán Golden argues, the gabions themselves, made by filling wire baskets with stones, are, in this way, “meant to stand but not to resist, wherein freedom of movement allows the stones to absorb the force of a tide that would annihilate resistance.” 42 While the coastline often tempts Healy into imagining a transcendent threshold, a liminal space through which one might escape or rise above material existence, his “plain dear labour” also insists on its materiality: the physical weight of the stones, the strain of lifting and placing them, the texture of their surfaces, and the stubborn reality of the work that must be done anew after each storm. Unlike inland areas, where the perception is arguably of the land being settled and self-contained, the coastline here is continually perceptible to change and disruption. It is a negotiation between land and sea that dissolves their boundaries. Our sense of the edge of land, the space on which we can claim a footing and a measure of certainty, wavers in a continual give-and-take between stability and flux, endurance and surrender. And Healy, who feels situated in this conversation through his building of walls to absorb the sea’s forces and through, most obviously, the location of his home on the edge of the sea, is granted a sense of immanence in the natural world: the feeling that he is embedded in its rhythms, in its language (“the pounding diction”), and, as he writes in “The Task” (2001), its future.
I’m down in the dab for hours before I take a break to see how far there is to go. Right round the alt and on forever, and I realise he’s set me a task for a lifetime, that man, that man who sent me down into the dab to hoke again’ the ocean
43
Here, as elsewhere in the later writing, the anguished exploration of selfhood often found in his early fiction is replaced by a smaller, quieter presence: that of the poet alone in the landscape. His perspective, attuned to the natural world—the rhythms of the tides, the sights and sounds of marine life, the shifting light across land and sea—sees the human figure as integrated into, rather than separated from, the natural order. For instance, in the poem “The Hares on Oyster Island” (1992), Healy writes about finding comfort in the idea that the hares living on a deserted island exist “out there beyond smell, beyond touch” in a utopia untouched by human interference and self-importance. “May they have long lives,” he writes, “the hares that afford us a break / from the language that would explain them.” 44 His fellow writer Brian Leyden suggests that Healy was “a poet of oceanic forlornness”, and if not forlornness, then there certainly seems a sense of yielding any sense of human mastery or explanation over and of the landscape. 45 For one, he knows that the walls he builds will soon be taken away “in a January storm,” and he knows that his lonely voice will be “immediately replaced by some other”. 46 But to live on the coast, he suggests, is to exist in a constant dialogue with impermanence, a world shaped by forces beyond human control or comprehension. It is an existence, as Ollie Ewing finds in Sudden Times (1999), at times so bracing that it can suspend, if only temporarily, one’s habitual sense of individuality.
The storm from the northwest was hurrying in from the Atlantic, and as it came thundering across the sea, it drove before it a barrage of bright sparkling lights. I stood behind the battery wall. To be, I thought.
47
The progression in Healy’s writing, as with many writers, is an opening outward of the narrative vision from the hooded self. The intensely self-examining short stories of Banished Misfortune (1982) give way by the time of Long, Time, No See (2011), to what Golden rightly describes as “an exterior polyphony of voices and descriptive details, a palimpsest the far side of interior monologue.”
48
In keeping with this, Healy’s narrative vision of the natural world becomes wholly expansive: rocks arriving at his doorstep after millions of years of travelling from Newfoundland
49
, stones lifted from “the remains of a parade in a Brazilian street”,
50
and fossils sent tumbling through mountains, valleys and tropics before arriving on the Sligo coastline. Wanting to avoid anthropocentric conceptions, Healy urges the reader to appreciate the landscape, particularly his immediate coastline, in the vast scale of “deep time”. Again, his dwelling encouraged such a perspective. What was effectively his front garden was Serpent’s Rock, a coastal formation designated as an Irish Geological Heritage Site for its startling abundance of Carboniferous fossils dating back over three hundred million years. But rather than treating the fossils as evidence of the permanence of the place, Healy, as Michael Cronin argues, set the fossils in motion to a remarkable effect.
51
Consider the following passage: Far from home the freed fossils of coral tumbled in the rising tides, then later travelled with the ice up the mountains and on through the valleys till they reached the heights where they sat forgotten in old forts to look back through to the gap at the distant equator where their ancient parents are laid out in spiralling tropics around the Serpent’s Rock.
52
Released from the torpidity of anthropocentric time, the fossils—long thought of as symbols of fixity—become agents of movement, testifying to a natural world shaped by immense, ongoing forces of transformation. In reanimating the ancient past, Healy unsettles any notion of the coastline as a fixed boundary between land and sea. Instead, it emerges as a dynamic threshold constantly rewritten by the shifting energies of wind, water and geological drift. From this ever-changing vantage point, poised at the confluence of land, sea, and sky, one is invited to witness and accommodate the great wholeness of existence.
Overhead an arrowhead of stars follows after an arrowhead of geese, both shot from the one bow that is no more.
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As Cronin observes, Healy’s work expands our understanding of place by moving “from the fragmented intransigence of the present to the long now of millennia,” reimagining coastlines not as stable, eternal boundaries between land and sea but as dynamic zones of severe fluctuation, where rocks formed millions of years ago continue their incessant journeys, and where constellations of geese and constellations of stars are, like the human observing them, already in the process of dying.
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Yet Healy’s particular gift lies in his ability to unite these elemental representations of the coastline with the stories, narratives and symbolic frameworks through which we make sense of place. While he portrays the coast as an ecological agent unbounded by the “comfortable timeframe of a few millennia” offered by biblical accounts, he simultaneously honours the human impulse to inscribe sacred or imaginative meaning onto the landscape.
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Consider, for example, his excitement at discovering a crucifix etched onto a small stone washed ashore: I found the Crucifixion on a small stone. The cloths of the man on the cross were blowing in exact lines, as were the cloths of the crouched penitent at his feet. I tossed the holy pebble aside to lift a rock into place (I’ll get it later) and then headed home, stopped, and went back to begin the search.
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Though he is aware of the vast geological movements that brought this object to shore—“the round stone has been through it all”—Healy cannot help but marvel at the sacred emerging unexpectedly from the sediment of the everyday. 57 It is a “holy pebble,” and even though he momentarily abandons it to return to his labour—to the lifting of stones and the duties of coastal life—he ultimately returns in search of it. It is a moment that encapsulates how, for Healy, the coastline, poised between the perceived solidity of land and the ceaseless motion of the sea, is a confluence of material and imaginative realities. And he, the poet living at this edge, recognises his important role as a witness and translator of this fragile boundary, where nature’s mysteries meet human experience to a spellbinding effect.
Conclusion
Seán Golden, a neighbour of Healy’s in Maugherow, believes that his friend’s move to the area coincided with a great widening of the narrative vision. What he calls Healy’s “palimpsest of meanings” began to stack up with his move to the coast around “the activity of being in the moment, of being in the world, of acting in harmony with the world, of giving every thing its due equal place.” 58 The idea of Healy possessing an internal “palimpsest of meanings” is especially resonant when considering his evolving portrayal of the coast. What I have been calling Healy’s coastal imaginary can be understood, in part, as an imaginative layering of memory, myth, lived experience, and ecological awareness, each inscribed upon the other and made visible through his writing.
Healy’s coastal imaginary, in this way, reveals his delight in both old and new stories. His portrayal of the coastline as a portal to the Otherworld, a shape-shifting realm beyond temporal limits, reflects an inheritance of Irish mythology. His evocation of the coast as the final threshold before a formless, primordial abyss aligns with a long textual tradition that has often abstracted and negated the material reality of the earth’s largest biome. Similarly, his childhood days fishing the strange, unknowable underwaters of Lough Kinale feed into his vision of the ocean as an embodiment of the ineffable.
Yet, often in the same breath, Healy couples this imaginative vision of the coastline with a grounded awareness of its material reality—its slow erosion by storms, its geological transformation over millennia, and its increasing precarity in the face of climate change. By showing, in his inimitable style, that the coastline is no mere abstraction or timeless emblem of cultural nostalgia, as much as it is a dynamic and vulnerable zone, shaped by natural forces and human impact alike, Healy’s writing bridges the symbolic and the physical, the mythical and the material, crafting a coastal vision that is both ecologically attuned and imaginatively expansive. And in doing so, he suggests that to truly know a place, particularly one as mutable and liminal as the coastline, requires both imaginative openness and material attentiveness.
His writing reminds us that the coast is not simply where land ends, but where perception broadens to meet the nonhuman world in all its mystery, agency and change, and where, as he writes, one most keenly feels the “echo of all that’s happened and all that will”. 59 In this way, he invites us to contemplate a coastal imaginary: a way of seeing and being in the world, distinct from inland perspectives, in which environmental realities and cultural narratives are inseparably intertwined.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.