MEMOIR: Call Mother a Lonely Field By Liam Carson Hag’s Head Press, 128pp. €12.99

CALL MOTHER A Lonely Fieldcharts Liam Carson's life to date, from the suburbs of West Belfast in the early 1960s, where he and his brothers were oddities known to speak Irish at home. At one point in his schooling he even bore the nickname "Fluent" among his peers.

There is Carson’s discovery of the power of the written word through the dystopian comics and novels of the early 1970s, the sudden and brutal outbreak of the Troubles that changed the lives of a generation overnight, and the author’s gradual distancing from his home and family through exile in London.

At the core of the narrative are Carson’s parents. “The Da” emerges from these pages as an extraordinary individual: postman, folklorist, self-taught Gaelgeoir, pub singer, author and lifelong Esperanto pen-pal of a Dutchman.

What is most remarkable is the context of pre-Troubles, non-sectarian tolerance in which all of these activities occurred. Carson senior’s grandfather, as the surname suggests, was originally Protestant and converted in order to marry a second time. He once had his postbag scattered accidentally by Ian Paisley on Royal Avenue, and reported the Big Man to have been “the model of decency and good manners”.

The letters of “the Ma” are quoted extensively. She saw Irish become synonymous with the Republican movement and retreated from it. Carson’s account of his mother’s final years in a nursing home in Cushendun, reduced to requesting permission from her adult children to return home (“Ba mhaith liom gabháil ’na bhaile”), makes for heartbreaking reading.

What makes Call Mother a Lonely Fieldsuch an unusual and pleasing memoir is the feel of collage it achieves. Lots of family photographs and cartoons and period advertisements are reproduced and incorporated seamlessly into the written text. One chapter ends gorgeously with a picture of the author's family that is introduced: "Here's my family in the days before I was born . . .", as if he has simply handed it to us to look at.

FOR SUCH Atiny book, it is crammed with dozens of stories. Dreams are recounted, the plotlines of adventure books paraphrased and analysed, poems and song lyrics reprinted, folk stories and urban myths retold.

It is, however, not simply a book of stories, but is also about the idea of story. The style has an oral translucence, and every narrative arrives to us with the sense that it has been told many times before, has altered with each retelling, and will again in the future.

At the core of the book is language. Carson is the current director of the Imram Irish Language Literature Festival and his love of Irish, its words and their etymologies, is present on every page here. There are many references to Dineens dictionary, teasing out nuances not present in English equivalents.

Carson maps his life through the course of his fluctuating relationship to the language. Describing the years of his punk rebellion, he writes of his disintegrating relationship with his father: “I was thinking in English; he was dreaming in Irish”.

Perhaps the best chapters here are those conflating the cacophony of the Troubles with that of the punk revolution. There is a marvellous description of walking through his favourite record shop in the aftermath of a fire-bomb, its “pools of oily water, vinyl albums melted into furls, curls, plastic flowers”.

Irish, in Carson’s mature imagination, becomes not so much lexicon as space, a tearmann or sanctuary. When he returns to it in middle age, he does so like Oisín returning from Tír na nÓg to find his peers all aged or gone. His mother, in her nursing home, returned to it as well. “She began to speak Irish to me again when I visited,” he writes. “It became a secret language . . .”.

This is a small book, and a hauntingly simple one. Though similar to Hugo Hamilton's wonderful The Speckled Peoplein subject, its style is much closer to a Blasket Island memoir relocated to Belfast in that city's most turbulent decades.

Carson mentions his father's love of those books, especially Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Fiche Bliain ag Fás. This seems like the present volume's most immediate model for luminous simplicity. Like Ó Súilleabháin, he does not gloss his years of exile, but rather moves straight from leaving to coming back.

Finally, the book refuses the sentimental glamour of elegy. Carson finds hope for the survival of the language in writers such as award-winning West Belfast performance poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, who learned his Irish from “the Da”.

Call Mother a Lonely Placeis an immensely pleasurable book, and a valuable addition to the canon of Irish autobiography.

Conor O’Callaghan is an Irish poet living in Manchester