Tanglewood is an outstanding piece of work by one of our most mature and courageous writers, one who is unafraid to hack his way through the tangles of contemporary Irish life and write a rare thing in Irish fiction: a serious state-of-the-nation novel.
I think of Bolger as Dublin’s Pasolini or, conversely, of Pasolini as Rome’s Bolger. Bolger’s poems are Dublin Elegies to lay alongside the Roman Elegies of Pasolini. And then there are other times when I think of Dermot Bolger as the Francis Ledwidge who survived the war, married and had children, and now is reporting…
Fierce, fierce work, dark, passionate and cathartic. Unique, strangely elegiac and loving. And the new poems are just astounding.
That mother of life, that coffin of death, the ocean will continue to compel writers to their task. The Lonely Sea and Sky is a beautiful novel that will suit all ages.
Bolger creates a personal, heartrending and atmospheric tale of the lives of these Irish sailors during a period of great international conflict… Dermot Bolger has done them justice in producing such a finely crafted and extremely readable tale which brings their story to life.
Bolger’s unforced style sings with colour, humour and excitement. But it’s the way he smuggles “the bigger themes” into the narrative hull that grants this historical fiction “modern classic” status.