Travel: Theo Dorgan abandons the day job and takes to the high seas for an inner journey.
For all that we are an island nation, we have precious little by way of literature of the sea. In the writings of Synge and the Blasket islanders, the sea is always something which took lives and provided a meagre living. No Herman Melville no Joseph Conrad for us, instead we turned our backs on the sea to embrace the land, the world of The Field and Tarry Flynn, the world of small landscapes and close communities.
Refreshing then that someone who was until recently very much a company man of the Irish literary world should use his first foray into prose to write a travelogue of a transatlantic voyage on a sail boat, from the West Indies to his native Cork. But in Sailing for Home, Theo Dorgan, poet and broadcaster, has come up with something so wonderfully unexpected that you're left questioning the Irish attitude to the sea that surrounds us.
Dorgan, an arts administrator extraordinaire, did something of a disappearing act a couple of years ago when he resigned his position in Poetry Ireland to devote more time to his art. Here he recounts how he made that step and the lingering guilt and fear - fear that the books would never be written, at abandoning a career which provided services for other artists to take time for his own writing. This is the first major product of what is for him a selfish devotion.
Recounting a voyage from Antigua to Kinsale, a distance of more than 3,000 miles, in the 70-foot Spirit of Oysterhaven, Sailing for Home is as much an account of an internal journey as it is a piece of travel writing.
The passage itself was fairly unremarkable from a sailing point of view, no hurricanes or dramatic sea rescues, but it is his poet's inner voice and his skill in expressing it, which makes this beautiful and wonderful book.
The Spirit of Oysterhaven is a fairly large - by Irish standards - schooner. Steel hulled and with two masts, it was built as an ocean-going yacht. Perfect for a voyage like this. But as with most boats, holes in the water into which we pour money, things are liable to wrong. The engine acts up from time to time (they all do) and as with most sailing boats you know that if something can break it will.
So it was with an air of expectation and trepidation that Spirit set sail from Antigua at the end of April, 2002, with a crew of four. Who knows on a trip like this what the weather will bring, what could go wrong? All were experienced sailors except the author. A middle-aged man, he took up sailing only a few years ago and then took a fairly unusual route once he started. Long passages across the notorious Bay of Biscay in bad weather are not something you would expect a novice to undertake. But that is where he found himself just six months before the transatlantic voyage.
On that occasion difficult weather conditions, equipment failures and rogue trawlers meant the Spirit of Oysterhaven had to speed for shelter, a nerve-wracking experience for even the most hardened sea dog, but terrifying for a novice.
But Dorgan took his courage in his hands and six months later he was back on the boat - ready to cross the Atlantic this time. Leaving the West Indies at the end of April they could expect a three-week tropical sojourn to the mid-Atlantic outpost of the Azores, provision there and then make a two-week dash up to Kinsale.
Should he ever get tired of poetry, the author would have a great future as a travel writer; this book is full of vivid descriptions of people, places and encounters. Anyone who has ever spent any time on a sailing boat will also recognise how his crew gels together, that growing realisation that a group of strangers at the start of a journey has somehow transformed into a band which is greater than the sum of its parts. He also catches unfailingly how every sail, no matter how enjoyable, no matter how beautiful the nights at sea are, is all about the landfall, that moment anticipated from the off, but never mentioned by anyone on board until it is imminent.
But it is the poet's inner voice which is the real strength of this book. His journey changes him from novice sailor into someone comfortable at the helm of a yacht in mid-Atlantic with just a very small crew. His inner journey on the other hand is full of the ghosts and people from his past, his doubts and dreams. It does take a little time to tune into what goes on inside his head, but once you do you get the impression that it is a man much more at peace with himself who lands in Kinsale.
Most of us who venture on the sea are too full of bravado and denial to let that inner voice out in public, but Theo Dorgan has done that for us. Sailors will instantly identify with what he describes, but this beautifully told story deserves a wider audience.
The author has taken most of us who know anything about him by surprise with this book. As one of the characters that pops up here might describe him: "Theo Dorgan is a migratory poet. He have a roundy head." I wonder what is going to come out of that marvellous head next?
Sailing for Home By Theo Dorgan, Penguin Ireland, 283 pp. £17.99
Fergal Keane is a reporter with RTÉ Radio One's Five Seven Live. He is also an experienced sailor