LOUIS de Bernieres has success on a fabulous scale in his life as writer. He has also befriended Limerick through the offices of CUISLE, Limerick’s annual international poetry festival, coming here to launch and talk. de Bernieres gave easily to City of Culture’s anthology, ‘Dream of a City’.
There’s a billowy full-sail quality to his take on romance, underpinned by sense. His novel ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ is a series of bossy advices as if he’s the grand-daddy of us all: “Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision”. And then: “Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.”
This poem that opens the Limerick anthology, ‘All My Salty Memories’, is for those of us back from holiday and knuckling into Trudgeville.
All My Salty Memories
And where did the dancing go,/ The music and humid nights/ We crammed with love and wine?
I fear they were never there – I might have made them up –
And all my salty memories/ Are mere imagination.
It seems they tapered away,/ But I do recall your soul and mine/ Making those salty memories; and it/ Wasn’t a dream, but you and I
Breathing our lives to the same rhythm,/ Beating time on the same tune,/ Locked together in travel.
