Dublin, Written in Our Hearts, edited by Declan Meade: A gloriously evocative and meandering trip through the city

On the top deck of the 15A bus, we travel with Anne Enright along Earlsfort Terrace and past the windows of the Stella Maris nursing home where that writer (and this one) was born, and look “at the bay window on the first floor. Behind that white curtain, I decided, was the room I first drew breath.” We follow the subterranean flow with archaeologist Karl Whitney in his essay, The Hidden Rivers of the Liberties.

“Sometimes, on a still and silent evening, you can even hear the water rush beneath your feet as you cross one of the Liberties’ long-buried rivers”. We stumble, woozy, through Temple Bar on a stag night described by Thomas Morris in All the Boys with the grotesqueness of a Hieronymus Bosch creation. Róisín Kiberd leads us through a brighter, neon-lit part of the city on her way to the night gym where she catches “glimpses of nocturnal economy: the flight crews pulling suitcases on wheels, and drowsy staff pouring out of the bars and restaurants of Custom House Quay”.



We are trapped in the internal, steamy world of a restaurant’s kitchen in Sarah Gilmartin ’s piece, Service. And “in a corner, hidden from the bar, by a stained-glass harp with honey strings and a red shamrock on its body” with a truant teenage boy in Kevin Curran’s Adventure Stories for Boys. [ ‘The city is always changing but this is the Dublin of now’: Declan Meade on capturing the capital in words and prose Opens in new window ] Or we are frozen in time like the statues in Peter Sirr’s excellent essay, Noise Off: Dublin’s Contested Monuments.

Sirr perfectly captures Julian Opie’s LED panels of orange walking figures as “elemental, childlike, yet they move with a fluid sensuousness ...

How jealous they must make the rest of the street’s figures, frozen forever in a single gesture.” Paula Meehan’s poem In Solidarity delivers us straight into the heart of Dublin city centre: “with the foggy dew, the waxy’s dargle, the dicey reillys, the heart of the rowls, the twangman, and the rocky road that led you down through the songlines of Dublin to the river itself, the seagull raucous Liffey; its smell, its swell, its angelus bells ringing o’er it, its crescent moon above, the whole world in a state of chassis, in solidarity.” The dead rise again in Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms, a short story that’s as brilliant and wildly inventive as anything by Flann O’Brien.

“If the dead were all around me, was it conceivable that I myself had joined their legion ranks? Was this heaven or hell on the North Circular Road? A ludicrous idea clearly. I was in far too much pain not to be alive. I soldiered on.

” FELISPEAKS describes Dublin as “heaving with the unremembered determined to be seen”, like the invisible woman in Belinda McKeon’s For Keeps. “A woman, she is that woman, walking down Exchequer Street. Without a single pair of eyes latching on to her.

Without that thing, that thing she used to take for granted.” [ ‘I am floored’: Anne Enright on winning $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize Opens in new window ] The volume was carefully edited by Declan Meade of The Stinging Fly , who saved the best story for second last. At just 25, Réré Ukponu is already an astonishingly honed and gifted writer, whose Famine Days quite brilliantly describes the experience of a black girl growing up in Dublin, and that particular and exquisite mortification a parent’s mere presence can cause in a teenager, especially one who already feels different and wants to disappear.

“These days the way Dad says my name makes me furious. The lack of hesitancy to hide the real hesitancy. Like the way you plunge into a swimming pool.

” And, later, describing her life as a small girl, “I am the glue-webby hands and the mess they made in class”. In his essay Undublining, Keith Ridgway writes that “Dublin, like anywhere else, is a subjective experience ..

. each one of us has a different idea of it.” Just as no two siblings have the same childhood, “[e]ach one of us is wrong, in our own particular way, and that is fine.

Anything you read about Dublin is not about Dublin at all. It’s about the writer.” [ Louise Nealon: ‘There is a reason why the vast majority of readers are women.

We tell ourselves stories to survive’ Opens in new window ] The only disappointment for me in this anthology was its bland, washed-out cover, evoking a dull school history book and belying all the sparkle and colour within. “ Dublin you are mine, but I’m happy to share you” – a line from Stephen James Smith’s poem that’s stayed with me since. I felt similarly and unexpectedly possessive and proud when I finished reading this beautiful collection.

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