In the Low Country

Borderland.

Borderlands have influenced my work from the beginning. I grew up in the city of Belfast, a city of sleech and mud built on stilts and culverts. The shipyard was its failing heart, its traffic the ferries that took the fleeing generations to Glasgow, Liverpool, and London by way of Cairnryan and Stranraer. Those watery transits met hard reality in the daily news, the bombs and shootings there like shoals beneath the surface. Later, I left for Dublin, Galway, and the American South. Always the coast stayed with me, and with it a sense of the necessity to find new ways to think and write about those water margins where the land and sea have share their sovereignty.

I have followed this impulse through studies of Irish and archipelagic literature, and though friendships and the exploration of coastal places wherever I have lived. With it has come a fascination for birds and small boats, the threads of water through the salt marshes of the coasts of South Carolina a particular favourite. I grew up in a seascape where the land was here and the water there, sand dunes like drumlins rolling to the beach. Further south the salt marsh is a marginal savannah, a grassland salted by the tide, the mud bed unsteady ground. Further out the beach shelves off in shallow waters, the shore birds flitting over the rippled plain, clouds and light changing with the season. My photograph suggests something of this transition of life in the tide, the rhythms of light and water like those of literature and experience, always changing.

—Nicholas Allen