This article explores how Dermot Healy’s writing bridges the gap between the imagined and material dimensions of the Atlantic coastline, offering a distinctive “coastal imaginary” rooted in both lived experience and mythic resonance. In addition to examining how Healy draws upon mythological, biblical, and folkloric traditions to portray the coast as a liminal space of mystery, memory, and transcendence, it also analyses—through close readings of his references to Hy-Brazil and meditations on stone wall-building and geological time—how Healy’s coastal life connected him to the physical realities of erosion, climate, and deep time, grounding his imaginative vision in the tactile and temporal textures of place. Overall, the study argues that Healy’s coastline is neither romanticised nor purely symbolic; rather, it emerges as a volatile, dynamic threshold where land and sea, past and present, dream and material reality converge. In doing so, Healy articulates a coastal imaginary that embraces uncertainty, fluidity and the enduring presence of the inexpressible.
Eamon Doggett (Sun,) studied this question.