Colm Toibin: North Atlantic Light

Photograph by Pádraig Grant

From On Elizabeth Bishop. Published by Princeton University Press.

"I am in Wexford now, in the southeast of Ireland, in a house close to the sea in Ballyconnigar Upper, or Cush, as it is called by the locals. My parents knew this stretch of coast; my father, in his twenties, with some friends, once rented a small house close to the strand near here. My parents also came on bicycles from the town of Enniscorthy on summer Sundays. There are photographs of them before they were married taken on the hill at Ballyconnigar Lower, which was also known as Keatings'; and then there are many more photographs of us as children when the family came here to spend the summer each year. While we lived our ordinary lives in the town, it is here, this small stretch of coast, this literal small backwater, where I feel closest to something I know, or remember, or wish to see again, write about again. 

 At first when I came back here, and even later, very little seemed to have changed, the smells were the same, or were familiar, as were some of the lanes and fields and ditches, and the mild good manners of the people were also familiar, and the light over the sea in the morning, and the way a rainy day can clear up in the evening, and the marly sand of the cliffs, and the strand itself, and the hesitant, insistent low waves and the small stones of different shapes and colours (no detail too small) at the edge of the shoreline that make a hollow rattling sound as they hit against one another when a wave comes in or else they are pushed toward the back of the strand by the tide and left there when the tide goes out."

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