Pat Boran’s 120-page, pocket-size excursion around Bull Island is a homage in Haiku to the airy, aqueous spirit of that legendary stretch of land. The experience is enriched by the poet’s delicately composed black-and-white images which accompany, on each facing page, the texts of the poems.
Bull island is 200 years old, having shimmered onto the hangar of the horizon following construction of the North Bull Wall between 1820-1825, which created new current formations ever since.
In an interesting afterword, Boran explains how he approached his dalliance with the haiku form. Suffice to say that at its most basic level, the traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables. The poet has stretched himself admirably within these and other haiku conventions, utilising a metrical format he felt comfortable with - ‘predominantly troichaic‘ – and seeking that ‘electrical charge’ that skilful rhyme can detonate.
Meanwhile, we are in the company of a sympathetic guide who has benign tolerance for the drinkers in the dunes, and a wry eye for the anarchic, giddy eruptions of summer, when the kids come out to play, to flirt and to bathe.
Bull Island is five kilometres in length and 800 metres across the chest (as my draper father used to denote with tape measure.) It is a Special Area of Conservation under the EU Habitats directive, and a UNESCO Biosphere reserve, but even the litter that occasionally appears in this remarkably swept island provides material for the poet:
Empty at first sight, /unless that is the message - / a bottle of light.
Was that litter anyway, or did the bottle simply float across from Wales, one finds oneself asking, as an answering haiku begins to form.
That particular haiku is accompanied by a photograph of an empty plastic water bottle and its shadow, the silhouette of a man walking in the distance, close to the water. Look at that glorious fall of sunlight, that dark-mottled sky and see Dublin in a new light.
Another gem of a photograph is that cosily-immersed seal, balefully eyeing the poet-photographer as though to say, don’t come too close, buddy. Corrugations of the seal's rubbery suit are echoed in water shadows, it’s quite an image.
Boran has lived for many years close to Bull Island, which is located above the point at which the river Liffey enters the sea. The wooden bridge that affords access is the subject of one of the poet’s miniatures.
Sleepers, nuts and bolts;/ and between the gap, the air/ in which this world floats.
One of my favourites is the following: Where the angler fell/ to his death, the sea remains/inconsolable. There are existential haikus in here that set one thinking a bit, which is what one does walking alone on a beach anyway. Sharing cigarettes,/old man sitting on the wall/with his former self.
Or this one, with its crisp fall of rhyme: “Glad we had this talk”,/ my self whispers to himself/(Never just a walk.) Boran's imaginative collection can easily be read in its entirety at one sitting, or dipped into – hard to avoid that usage when we are talking water. Talking water - now there's an image to conjure with.
Paddy Kehoe
