Bill Kirk: Sandy Row

Description

Bill Kirk: Sandy Row

Can words transcribe the smell, the flavour, the structure of a memory? Can words bring back a time long past? Marcel Proust thought so and devoted seven volumes “in search of lost time” to that attempt. To some level, this book by Bill Kirk also attempts to do the same: to fight the erasure of time; to bring back to life – people, characters, streets, birds, sidewalk, white socks, bonfires, bricks, concrete, clouds, the smell of tobacco, the texture of tweed, the music, sausages, fish and chips, all of this making a texture, a feel of a place and time.

The place is Sandy Row, a Unionist neighbourhood near Belfast city centre and the time is 1974, forty plus years ago, a lifetime: the time to get old, the time to die, the time to have children, the time for those children to have children, the time for many generations of dogs to have come and gone: the big river of life.