Dermot Healy: Poetry in coastal erosion

It is late June 2024 in Ballyconnell, north Sligo, where the greening of the reedbeds is in full sway. The constant showers, punctuated by intense, brief bursts of heat, have brought forth dazzling clumps of fluffy white bog cotton the size of summer clouds. In the luminous salty spray swept inland from the white-capped sea, it takes a moment to resolve the contours of the coastal cottage where the writer Dermot Healy with his partner Helen set up house in the early 1990s. A dwelling so close to the Atlantic, it might be a small craft pointed into the waves.

Above a pebbly beach with grey sand, the marram grass holds fast to the embankment alongside the laneway to the cottage and its outbuildings. The packed clay, sand and stones of the embankment are bolstered by strategically placed wire cages filled with rocks. The configuration and embedding of these coastal-erosion-preventing boxes, or gabions to give them their proper name, were decided only after Dermot’s meticulous, daily observations of the swirls and sluicing movements of incoming and outgoing tides, and the most vulnerable points of encroachment during high seas and storm surges.

In Dermot and Helen’s time, the gabions that kept the sea back from their property needed regular maintenance. And Dermot routinely arrived on the strand to issue instructions to a local digger-man teamed with his brother, there to gather and pack stones into the hungry maw of the gabions that came in the form of flat-packs. Dermot was wearing his tattered anorak, jeans and knitted jumper, and his reddish-grey hair and beard and his inclination to hunch his shoulders lent him the look of a seasoned mariner; an “old tar” with a lifetime of rum and hostels and seafaring ordeals under his belt.

Walking the beach, I’d stop for a neighbourly chat while he used a set of pliers to fix the wire ties needed to assemble the gabions by hand in the perishing cold, and then manhandle heaps of stones to cram into them. With hindsight, I wonder now if this coastal remediation work, and how industriously Dermot applied himself to it, had in common with his writing the challenge of placement. The placement of irregularly sized stones in the gabions to fashion a bulwark that would last into the future corresponding with his skill in making meaning through the placement of words with the pressures of posterity to contend with.

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From where I stood, the enormous store he put in these measures seemed more wishful than realistic. If a truly violent storm struck, nothing so provisional or home-made could surely hold back the sea. And in extreme weather events, the gabions over which Dermot exercised such proprietorial interest did in fact get submerged, and the high seas fray and claw at the embankment they were meant to protect. Though storms of an even more violent intensity that over-topped the gabions and the embankment and pushed the sea inland were mercifully rare.

At such times, the briny torrents became a destructive emulsion of seawater and churning stones that made tatters of the beach, pummelled holes in the embankment, smashed gabions open, tore up the roadway and came to rest in mountainous heaps of stones scattered across the road and fields chock-a-block with seaweed, marine debris, crab and lobster shells and the occasional fish.

In the aftermath of such poundings, depending on the scale of the incursion, there might be a day or a week of clearing up before Dermot and Helen could use their laneway again. The cottage itself having withstood the onslaught with a precarious but defiant staunchness. And with the clear-up done, Dermot could go back to his writing. Back to the very thing that seemed to have drawn him here in the first place. The challenge to “contain the uncontainable”.

For Dermot, it appeared to be a worthwhile trade-off. The security of owning a home and a place to write, matched with the threat posed by the sea to that very security. Life at this extremity gave him the essential imaginative supply he needed to earn his livelihood. A rarity in that respect, Dermot was an established writer without a teaching or lecturing position. He facilitated writers’ groups, he led workshops, he took up occasional residencies, but mainly he wrote. And his writerly instincts had led him to this immoderate edge.

According to Dermot, he’d bought the cottage at night. The contract with the seller signed in the dark by the light of a match. Conditions were basic and rooms hard to heat. Solid fuel fires were the primary source of comfort. But from the front door there was an unsurpassable view: a blissful panorama of purple mountains and blue sea and variegated coastal hinterlands as beautiful and appeasing as the sea behind his house was wild and threatening.

To discover Dermot stationed in his morning sunlit front porch, inhaling the day, was to encounter someone in an unassailable state of “here-and-nowness”. A writer entirely at home in a place that heightened the expectations he had for himself to do a worthwhile job of rendering it truly.

His relationship with this stretch of coast finding its sweetest and fullest expression perhaps in A Fool’s Errand. A poetry collection rejoicing in and puzzling over the annual spectacle of the migrant barnacle geese. Each year, from October to April, in the morning and again at nightfall, like celestial clockwork, the winter visiting barnacle geese overflew his iron-roofed cottage. They winged between the mainland and Inishmurray Island, their sea-surrounded nocturnal refuge 6km off the coast. The “barnies”, as they were fondly known, were both a transitory and a fixed feature of life on this stretch of coast, generating what Dermot thought of as “the writing in the sky”.

The cottage itself withstood the onslaught with a precarious but defiant staunchness

Then, in 2015, Dermot’s follow up poetry collection, The Travels of Sorrow, appeared posthumously. Its publication followed his sudden, unexpected death from natural causes, aged 66, on June 29th, 2014, at home, in his bed, in his cottage by the sea. A shock like the thud of a colossal wave breaking on the reef behind his house.

On the 10th anniversary of the death of Dermot Healy, it is still difficult to get used to his absence. A multitudinously talented poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, actor, director and editor, the marginality of his way of life continues to raise questions for me about the creative benefits and professional drawbacks of peripherality. And at a time when it is hard to foresee from a creative standpoint what society will be like in another 10 years – will there be a readership interested in the kind of books Dermot published or the stage plays he wrote? Or will his and my own endeavours be considered outmoded, irrelevant, anachronistic, superseded. The future for tried-and-tested bulwarks never more in question or unforeseeable, or more likely to be swept aside by a tsunami of change.

Treading the bog-cotton-covered headland adjacent to that cottage on the edge, the steady procession of the waves up the beach that lap at the stone-filled gabions, or what’s left of them, might be viewed as life going on as always. But the cottage, which is still largely as it was in Dermot and Helen’s time, will be undergoing changes planned by a new owner with fresh ideas for the place. The poet’s house in its next iteration. Though for a while longer anyhow, it exists as a reminder of the balance struck by Dermot Healy when he chose to situate his life and his work in a place as remote as this. A volatile locale in which to maintain one’s presence in the world. He’d found his spot. The place he needed to be.

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