Sweet Killough Let Go Your Anchor: Let Go Your Anchor

While this lyrical and affecting depiction of life in a Northern Ireland seaside village of the 1930s may be too unassuming to hoist prominant Irish journalist and civil servant Hayes into the pantheon of eminent literary memoirists, it is nevertheless a graciously unpretentious and gently entertaining exercise in the art of childhood recollection. A particularly alert and perceptive youngster, Hayes maintained a kind of participant-observer status in the close-knit Killough community because his family was originally from the south and therefore technically outsiders. Here he sketches a neatly impressionistic child's eye portrait of life in the village, evoking the landscape, individuals and events of his childhood with commendable enthusiasm and detail. Particularly engaging are re-creations of the conversations of the village elders, the religious and social rituals of the area, the local race meetings, and the fishing trade that was the village mainstay. Writing with what Seamus Heaney, in his rather flattering introduction, calls an ``air of positive equanimity,'' Hayes displays a winning ability to reproduce the child's sense of poetry and awe at his world, and to render tangible the subtleties that made a rural upbringing ``supportive, caring and generally compassionate.'' With pen-and-ink sketches by Jim Manley. (Jan.)