Riverbank City

A German city through Irish eyes. Bringing with him from North East Ireland an affinity for rivers, shipyards, docks and the sea, the poet Ian Watson put down roots in Bremen, North West Germany, where he has spent well over half his life. It is a proud mercantile port, now post-industrial and hankering slightly after its Hanseatic ‘glory days’. His initial culture shock merged into resigned acceptance into fondness into home. A commuter between two very different cultures, Watson lives not between, but inside both; his love of the city, his children’s birthplace, is still curved through the immigrant’s prism and filtered through another language, offering readers a new angle on Bremen …