Memoir:Ireland is a small country; indomitable, yes, but tiny; disproportionate in ambition and in talents, and absolutely chockfull of writers. What was it Kavanagh reckoned? A standing army of 5,000 poets? And that was even before courses in Creative Writing. If you stand around long enough, north or south, some poet'll soon come and claim your ground, and start hymning it on your behalf.
The poet and critic Gerald Dawe, writing in My Mother-Cityabout childhood holidays in Bangor, Co Down, remembers going "into Ward Park to look at the big Gun, flowerbeds, and Bowling Green". I'm sitting here now, looking at that Park as I'm typing: the big gun's still there, and the flowerbeds, and the bowling green. Some things never change.
Then again, some things change utterly. The title essay in this book of autobiographical writing describes the Belfast of the late 1950s and 1960s, and what Dawe calls the "grotesquely theatricalised" cityscape of the Troubles: security barriers, peace lines. It's a portrait of a place and a time as familiar - and yet as strange - as Weimar Berlin, or 19th-century London, or 1970s New York. A psychological state as much as a place; still there, menacing; vanishing. "Coming into Belfast", the book begins, "is like approaching a sunken city".
As befits a memoir, the book is itself a palimpsest, pieced together from other books ( The Rest Is History), and essays in journals and magazines. There has always been a strong tradition of odd, free, fiery autobiographical writing from Ulster: MacNeice's The Strings are False; CS Lewis's Surprised by Joy; Sam McAughtry; Ciaran Carson; the various worlds and work of Polly Devlin. But the time for Ulster autobiography, reflecting on the past now that it most definitely is the past, has clearly come: this year alone has seen Patricia Craig's delightful Asking for Troubleand Malachi O'Doherty's disturbing The Telling Year.
Dawe's neither delights nor disturbs: no fire-cracker he, he chronicles. He quotes from histories, and novels and poems, all of the books one would expect, the standard texts: Jonathan Bardon's Belfast: An Illustrated History, Patrick Buckland's A History of Northern Ireland.Dawes's unique contribution to the burgeoning genre is not, however, mere diligence - though diligence is always to be admired - and nor is it clarity nor proportion, clear and proportionate though he undoubtedly is. What Dawe does that no one else can do is to write dispassionately about Van Morrison.
Almost a quarter of Dawe's memoir is taken up with a detailed account of Morrison's early career, from his now-legendary cleaning of Belfast windows to his playing with Deanie Sands and the Javelins (who became The Thunderbolts, who became The Monarchs), his reading of Kerouac's On the Road, and the showbands, and Them, and then off to the US. Dawe's Morrison pages are so crisp and so clear, so succinct they read almost like synopsis.
There is much else in the book, and much of it good: reflections on Belfast's working-class traditions of music-making; reminiscences of the playwright Stewart Parker. But the whole comes alive most vividly at those moments when Dawes risks the personal, when he abandons judicious summary and flings himself in amidst his historical material, as in his poem Responsibilities:
"It's like I haunt this
dormitory town of parks
and one-way streets,
of evangelical picnics
and children screeching
through days on the beach,
for there in the rented
redbrick holiday homes
families keep the faith,
and for all I know,
those who lie awake
reading the Old Testament
dream of tomorrow's excursion
and pray for the sun."
That's my little spot, damn him.
Ian Sansom's new novel, The Mobile Library: The Delegates' Choice, will be published by Harper Collins in January. His book The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry (Quercus) is out now
My Mother-City By Gerald Dawe Lagan Press, 167pp. £12.99