Other People's Lives

Dermot Bolger's last new collection of poetry was The Venice Suite, a heart-breaking voyage through loss that touched the nation with its raw honesty. With this new book, Other People's Lives, Bolger's gaze ranges outwards to take in the often untold stories of those who have peopled Dublin's streets over the last century.

Every night during a year spent in lockdown, the poet Dermot Bolger set out on long walks through deserted streets, armed only with a pen and paper. The poems in this collection stem from the thoughts that ambushed him during these nocturnal strolls, being speculative meditations on his own life and the lives of other people - famous, forgotten or imaginary.

Here we encounter Nuala O'Faolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett still defiant in her lonely final years; the poet's own parents during their wartime honeymoon; Arthur Fields who took photographs on O'Connell Bridge for half a century; Herbert Simms, the brilliant overworked housing architect who took his own life under the strain of trying to house Dublin's poor; and Patricia Lynch, writing children's books about Irish folklore in one room while the husband she adored wrote communist tracts in the next. Interlaced with these real lives are imaginary ones - a hardened criminal in Mountjoy Jail detailing his life in haikus and imagined alternative lives that the author himself might have chosen to live.

Bolger follows in the footsteps of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, in using the backdrop of walks through his native city to allow his imagination free rein to explore his life and the lives of others in this series of remarkable poems.