A Limerick Soundscape

Abstract

A Limerick Soundscape Seán Lysaght (bio) I've written about growing up in a small Victorian terrace house in Limerick containing my father's book collection. With this stock of books throughout the house, even in the bedrooms, it was not easy to wrest some literary territory of my own out of our library-home, but this I gradually did with a modest store of French and Russian novels in translation, some slim volumes of poetry, and the books we read at school. As well as these "high-pilèd books," there was also a local literary scene in the city with a character—and characters—of its own. I use the term literary scene rather than literary tradition for those years; it could be argued, however, that Jim Kemmy's work in the 1980s and '90s, as editor of the Old Limerick Journal and of two important anthologies of Limerick writing, has now created what amounts to a literary tradition for the city and county. This is variously supported nowadays by the huge repository of printed holdings for North Munster at the Glucksman Library of the University of Limerick, the work of the Limerick Writers' Centre, and ongoing literary events and educational programs. All that was in the future when I started out, armed with my own hesitations and curiosity, to see what was on offer beyond the hall door. Our house at Osmington Terrace was just above Thomond Bridge, on the northern, Clare side of the River Shannon; the riverscape at this point is dominated by the imposing Norman walls and towers of King John's Castle and St. Mary's Cathedral. Stepping out of the house, often with a fishing rod or a pair of binoculars, I left the congested space of our home for the wide, generous sweep of Ireland's greatest river flowing through the city. It was a breezy, open topography of water with its cluster of history crowded to the waterfront; from here, standing atop St. Mary's Cathedral, the novelist Kate O'Brien celebrated the virtues of her native city as "a kind of cold restraint, an underflow of silence, a busy, throwaway glance." There were then two bridges over the Shannon: the old Thomond Bridge near the castle, and the newer Sarsfield Bridge a few hundred meters farther downstream. No one—except some hardened fishermen—ever lingered on either bridge because of exposure to the elements: you walked briskly across, buffeted in either case by the close passage of traffic. Thomond Bridge would [End Page 9] take me toward the castle, and the network of streets on King's Island, the old English town. Sarsfield Bridge brought me into the modern city center, where the streets had been laid out in a grid pattern by Georgian planners in the eighteenth century. During the summer, when swifts nesting in the castle walls screamed in the sky overhead, Limerick saw a good many North American tourists, who usually arrived through Shannon Airport. With these tourists in view, a group of literary-minded people held weekly readings in a room in the castle. Part of the intention here was to showcase some representative Irish culture for a visiting audience, but the evenings also became a platform for local poets to read. Popular classics such as Yeats's "Innisfree" took it in turns with literary novices like myself, and we all got a hearing from appreciative listeners. A great part of the appeal of these readings, I believe, was the venue: you had to climb an imposing set of steps between two towers of the castle, enter through a high, fortified, riveted doorway, climb an outer staircase, and negotiate a narrow passage to reach a spacious, round chamber. As there was little natural light here, even on those fine summer evenings, several candles were placed in bottles and hung around the walls. Seating was also rudimentary: readers and listeners alike perched on plain, backless benches. At about the same time, the Shannon Development Company was running medieval banquets in Bunratty and Knappogue Castles, to a high degree of comfort; there was a sense for us that the castle readings were a kind of low...