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 the whole story back to us in sequences of heart-breaking poems. Like Ledwidge, Bolger is a direct, lineal descendant of John Keats; he writes out of ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’.