Meet Ollie Ewin, the young Irish carpenter who narrates this book. Ollie is a troubled lad, who has hallucinations during the day and cannot sleep because of his nightmares. We first meet him as a lowly clerk in a supermarket and are made part of the terrifying past that haunts him. But the details are never spelled out and one can only guess at the outlines. Then Ollie goes to London and the whole story congeals and unfolds. Ollie blames himself for some of the terrible things that happened that time in London while he is unable to understand the others. He is caught in a swamp of vicious crime and it slowly drowns him. The story escalates until it ends in a nasty persiflage of justice.

First of all, the author shows courage in starting a book with events that make little sense, trusting that the reader will not give up on him. Secondly, he shows incredible imagination in placing us into the tortured soul of this young man and succeeding in making us feel it. And, in addition, the language is superb.

This is a must-read!

Dermot Healy is amazingly talented. I have now read three books by him - 'The Bend for Home', 'Sudden Times' and 'A Goats Song' (still my favorite of the three). Each time I read him, I am stunned by how, well - perfect - his writing is. His characters tend to have lost thier minds (madness, drink, drugs,or some combination), and the line between what's 'real' in the novel and what the character is hallucinating is never clear. Why do they go about things the way they do? Well, because people do... Like many of Angela Carter's creations, Healy's characters are appealing and attractive, yet at the same time annoying and almost repulsive... In the end, the reader is offered no explanation of what went on - if the character himself doesn't know, how can he explain it to US? He told it to us the best he knew how, anyway. The books have some very undefineable beauty to them. I don't understand why Dermot Healy is not more widely recognised than he is.

This book will stun you with its raw power. And unlike many other Irish novels, this one draws its power from its simplicity, rather than from lush description or the accumulation of details. Stripping language to the bare bones here, Dermot Healy draws the reader directly into the mind of the main character, Ollie Ewing, without artifice or embellishment.

Ollie has just returned to Sligo, almost mute with shock from terrible events which have befallen him while in London, and his voice reflects both his trauma and loss. He talks to the reader in quiet, almost confessional tones, using unadorned, simple language to describe things he sees that are not there and voices he hears that no one else can hear. Never wasting a word, his earnest, narrative whispers force the reader to share his thoughts while interpreting his state of mind.

Ollie's almost paralyzing experiences in London-protection rackets on construction sites, goons who act with impunity, murders accepted as part of the game, and a judicial system more geared to fancy talk than to simple statements of truth-all catch the reader up in a whirlwind of emotions. Ollie's plaintive voice, crying out from all this, will echo long in the reader's mind. And this remarkable achievement by an author with total control may echo even longer.

"After the Off" is yet another brilliant documentary photograph book of Bruce Gilden's work. His artistic motifs of flash and disembodied figures leads to a riveting, mesmerizing look at the seemingly mundane world of Irish horse racing. Anyone thinking of a placid view of Irish racing will be stunned, and perhaps, shocked by his photographs. Dermot Healy's short story is a fine coupling, but it is completely overshadowed by Bruce Gilden's photography.

What a refreshing book! The photographs are so wonderful and I love the type design! Yolanda Cuomo's studio is on a roll!

I can't believe the reviews this book has been getting. I found it to be a major waste of time and regretted reading it. My problem is with the prose style - he never uses one adjective when 4 can be used. The book is nearly 500 pages long, if it was reduced to 200 or so it could be really good. 150 pages are excellent - the rest is genuinely cringeworthy.

The plot -- alcoholic catholic playwright falls in love with northern protestant girl -- very original! His descriptions of Belfast are excellent and other sections also. The rest is overwritten claptrap, he goes off on a journey of purple, nay vermilion, prose and emotional peregrinations which seemed designed more to confuse the reader that he/she is reading some high art rather than gettin on with his book. I felt like throwing away the book in disgust several times. If this is what it takes to be praised as a great Irish writer then I'm going to write a computer program to take care of all the work, sit back and watch the reviews pour in.

Dermot Healy is defintely a very talented writer, other books (e.g. The Bend for Home) are much better. We could do without the poetic crud though.

"Every time you weep in a theatre you're listening to a goat singing."

This is the Author, Dermot Healy, explaining through the playwright/protagonist Jack Ferris, what Jack's trade is. As I have now read this second book by Mr. Healy, after completing "Sudden Times", it also is an apt description of the Author as well. You cannot categorize nor summarize what Mr. Healy creates and then relates to readers in a word, or two, or four. Just as with the fictional Jack Harris, an explanation is needed, and not just an ordinary statement, but also a demonstration of not only the wide knowledge, but also the true understanding the Author commands of his knowledge to exacting detail. The exchange that follows is Jack's half of a conversation with Catherine who wants to know what he does. After the lines below she still has no clue, and neither did I. However by the bottom of the page not only do we learn what he does, but its origins, a bit about Greek theatre, and even that goats cannot swim.

"I do a spot of writing."

"Plays, I'm interested in plays"

"I pen songs of the buck. Billy Tunes"

"Goat Song's"

Now if this Author's prose is compared to what we normally would read, "What do you do?" I write plays, tragedies", you begin to gain an appreciation of just how special this man's literary gifts are. The example I share is not the exception with his work rather it is the rule. These are not clever sounds bites surrounded by mediocrity, this man consistently writes with a level of expertise, which is remarkable. It has been mentioned that the first section is overly long, and at first it appears to be. However once you are into the balance of the book, extending to the very end, the first section underpins the entire tale.

There is a single or perhaps singular event that symbolizes much of what takes place in the book. It is not the death that is the issue, it is the symbolism of the location, the deceased's relationship with the institutions that bracket his death, and the man, and his Daughter Catherine, who live with those realities, or will live with the lingering effects in Catherine's case, that make the event so pivotal.

Mr. Healy's created worlds and the people that inhabit them are generally not people the reader would enthusiastically change places with, if places changed at all, ever. His creations are troubled people, not necessarily in a unique manner as they are the result of a Country divided by violence, Religious based hatred, and hundred of years of pain both suffered and inflicted. In certain key events it is the characters themselves who are at the center of the violence that they and the next generation will continue to suffer for, through guilt, paranoia, prejudice, and anger that borders on hatred. As if to ensure the events can never be properly dealt with, abuse of alcohol guarantees that melancholia will be as contented as these otherwise miserable people are. Even here the abusive drinking is not just a standard Irish cliché, the author makes these characters more complex by bringing you right along side their thoughts as he always does. He lets the reader experience the mental anguish that at times borders on psychotic.

Mr. Healy has the gift of immersing the reader in a story that is not necessarily fantastic, and certainly not contrived. He continually demonstrates that the people he creates are all too familiar, that daily life is not grindingly repetitive but fascinating.

It is no wonder at all that top writers speak of this man's work in terms of absolute praise of the highest order. That they are gifted, proven writers, who praise his work above their own, make their endorsements all the more impressive.

"Goat's song" is the literal translation of the word "tragedy." There is no better way to sum up this book than a beautiful, heart wrenching tragedy.

The book follows the life of playwright Jack Ferris as he loves, loses, remembers, and recounts the early life of Catherine, an aspiring actress. The tone of the book is so personal, it felt as if Healy were writing from experience. Healy writes beautifully, oftening slipping into a sort of stream of consciousness to bring the reader into the liquor induced insanity Jack so often experiences. He conveys the desperation of the characters and their emotional, almost physical, pain in such an immediate way, I felt truly depressed as I got deeper into the book. The story begins with the ending, jumps to the beginning, then progresses inexorably towards the heartache you know is to come. The book's ending is simply perfect.

An added bonus to the beautifully told story is the wonderful peek into Irish life. The book is set in Northern Ireland before and during the troubles, as well as in the Republic of Ireland, both in the city and in an ancient village. As an American, it was a delight to read the many voices of the Irish people. However, I ran into some difficulty with the politics. Healy uses RUC/Provo, Loyalist/Republican, Protestant/Catholic interchangably and without explanation, so if you have no frame of reference for the politics of Northern Ireland, it is easy to get lost in the terms. However, that may have been by design, as Healy tried to convey the subtleties and complexities of living in the midst of revolution.

I truly enjoyed the emotional ride of this book. While I quite often disliked the characters, I couldn't help but feel compassion for them.

The cover picture is not Irish but is a photograph of the small town in ENGLAND where I grew up !

Dermot Healy doesn't write like Frank McCourt or anyone else, he writes his memior like Dermot Healy. Accept that and you are off to a good start to be able to appreciate his memior.What I found refershing about his way of writing was he did it more to a way that people do tend to recall their lives. It isn't always in direct synchronization,neat,tidy,perfect. We wander,there are impressions we gather because we don't always recall exact verbatum of conversations - here is where writers must embellish a bit creatively.Try to recall your own life to date, try to think of writing it. This isn't so scattered you can't make out what he is talking about but it is written in a style where we are guided to meander with him through his memories,thoughts,impressions.I think we tend to recall our lives by a more personal set of perceptions rather than _always_ an objective,clear-cut unbiased point of view. He doesn't make excuses or seem to be trying to draw pity, he reveals himself to be ultimately human, we self-inflict our own pain most of the time, we set our selves up for a good kick in the teeth. Our lives aren't always so neat and edited.

The one thing I did notice missing from his memior (which initiates at childhood,flashes into youthful adult and weaves back into adolesence and then again forward to his mother being into her 80's and I would suppose him in to his 40's)is what happened during his 30's, and later a marriage. We are only briefed that he has had a daughter to whom a woman he didn't marry - there is no story of that relationship nor of his later marriage which also he quickly mentions. It leads me to feel these were not details he felt ready to share - understandingly likely because these people are still living and out of respect for privacy of their lives - none the less it would have done no harm to bare out a little more understanding, however basic which could have been done respectfully. I noticed the same with Frank McCourt's book- Angela's Ashes - he neither went into more of his life leading up to marriage or after it. The Bend for Home is a really well written book, just know it is _not_ written in the run of the mill manner in which we are used to finding on bookshelves for sale, he writes in an unappologetic fashion which displays his unique creativity as a writer.Great job, Dermot!!!

In this bittersweet memoir about growing up and growing old, Dermot Healy explores the quality of memory, of tales told and heard and told again, of times half-remembered. Highly stylistic prose reflects the stream of human consciousness, where sometimes a leaf floats past and we think we recognize it as a leaf that floated past a year before. Dermot Healy's "Bend for Home" is part "Portrait of the Artist" and part "Angela's Ashes," combining the ambient grey of Irish poverty with characteristic Irish humor.

Healy has been criticized for betraying his mother's memory in the book's sometimes hilarious, sometimes wrenching last chapter. But it is one of the most touching accounts of a son and mother's last days together since I read Mark Spragg's "Where Rivers Change Direction." What would make his mother proud is knowing that Healy has become one of the first rank of Irish authors, and his account of her decline is a sad, beautiful piece of work.

Healy should be more widely read in America, if only because his is an original voice in a new key, Irish accent or not.