Foreword by Miriam O’Callaghan

Introduction by Pat Boran

Pat Boran, one of Ireland’s most noted literary figures, has curated this wonderful collection of Irish prose, poetry and short plays in support of Shine. His eloquent introduction emphasises that the point of the book is not to be therapeutic but to help raise awareness of Shine’s work. He describes how, during the initial phases of the book’s development, he and John Saunders, CEO of Shine, agreed that the anthology should not be limited to writing about mental health, per se, but should, through a broad collection of contemporary Irish literature, present mental ill health as inseparable from the important issues that matter to us as a society. This decision, to my mind, is key to the real gift of this book: it chronicles some of the most significant emotional and psychological experiences of life, forging a familiarity and commonality that transcends the sometimes indistinct boundaries between mental illness and well-being.

This is a book to dip in and out of. The contributions are assembled in alphabetical order according to the authors’ surnames and comprise a combination of new and previously published works. I found it somewhat disconcerting, initially, to jump from poem to short story to diary excerpt to stage scene; but my pace was necessarily slowed by the need for reflection and digestion after many of the pieces. A remarkably impressive list of contributing authors includes Colm Toibin, Kevin Barry, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Gabriel Rosenstock, Michael D. Higgins, Colum McCann and Paul Durcan. The breadth of the collection encompasses love, grief, regret, adjustment, ageing, self-doubt, addiction, guilt, fear, kinship and so on. The alphabetical order means that, as in life, there is sometimes a jarring juxtaposition of themes and emotions. An extract from Mike McCormack’s ‘Solar Bones’ describes a son recalling his father’s descent into decrepitude due to grief and illness while the next page contains ‘Good Vibes’, a short, playful verse that delights in life’s accidental moments of fun. Universal themes are explored from disparate and sometimes opposing views. A childhood memory is a source of guilt and secret shame in ‘The Aviary’ while Dermot Bolger clings to the memory of a former girlfriend which evokes for him moments of the greatest intimacy and love. For the author of ‘The Notebook of Maeve Maguire’, memory serves as comfort upon receiving news of her father’s death while a character with dementia in the same piece serves to question the reliability of memory at all.

Appropriately, there is no shying away from darker or more sensitive subject matter. Philip Casey’s ‘Cruelty’ is an extraordinarily succinct indictment of the lifelong ramifications of childhood trauma. Ireland’s erstwhile asylum system and the secrecy and silence that accompanied it are regularly referenced. Paul Durcan contemplates suicide while Padraig J. Daly mourns a friend who took his own life. Emigration, addiction and emotional isolation are explored, though never gratuitously; as Pat Boran writes, ‘the contributions, though typically gentle and careful, are charged with that urge to break the silence’, an uncomfortable but necessary feat in a country struggling to understand how to process and come to terms with many aspects of its past.

If I had a criticism of the collection it would be the relative absence of recovery themes and the lack of reflection upon the capacity for growth and learning as a result of emotional or psychological adversity. Treatment is occasionally mentioned, most notably in ‘Leaving St. Elizabeth’s’ which portrays a nightmarish experience of electroconvulsive therapy and ‘Black Dogs’ in which the protagonist is undergoing therapy. But I would have been interested in a perspective of what recovery entailed, what was learned from the process, whether it affected a new understanding of the self or had an impact on a person’s sense of mastery or future outlook.

Hope is by no means absent, however. Gabriel Fitzmarice writes:

Thanks to the craftsmanship and generosity of some of Ireland’s finest writers, ‘Shine On’ is a body of work that reminds us of the capacity that we have to empathise with one another, assist in each other’s distress and share in their joy. In an extract from Lia Mills’ diary, written as she awaited surgery for oral cancer, she reflects that ‘whatever fears, worries or wild ambition we harbour, we go through the same motions’. There is hope in this, indeed.

Conflicts of Interest

None.