Where the heart is?

SOME is the most profoundly emotive word of all. Many of the world's most memorable stories, from "The Odyssey" to "The Three Little Pigs", are essentially about home, homelessness and the longing to return. "Home is where I hang my hat," says an American song; "Home is where I hang my head," says a parody of it.

The writers of no other race, not even the Jews, can out write those of Ireland - and those who used to be of Ireland - when it comes to making art out of homesickness. This gut wrenching anthology of prose and poetry is further proof of that generality.

Irish Permanent Plc, appropriately enough, supported the publication of Home, in which the most poignant passages are about unhappiness caused by impermanence. The authors whose work appears in the book have waived the royalties it might have earned them, so that sales will benefit Focus Point Ireland, the admirable national agency dedicated to the alleviation of homelessness.

In an illuminating preface, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, the agency's president, recalls the consensus of women "out of home" who inspired establishment of this organisation: "They said that being without a home meant being without safety and security, being without dignity and respect."

The traditional idea of home, which most people in the country attain, or come somewhere close to attaining, is only implied in much of this thought provoking anthology. Kennedy hopes that the contributing writers' nostalgia and some disillusionment will move readers to empathise with "those who are out of home, wandering abroad, lost, displayed, trapped in the culture of the streets with all its dangers . .

Desmond Hogan, who has made a literary speciality of nomadism, quotes the sort of warning that the Irish exile may be greeted with away from his homeland (especially by other Irish exiles who got there first): "You'll never fit in here, an Irish woman whom I very vaguely knew told me when I came to live in London permanently."

Building a new house of one's own is not always a fool proof enterprise, as Anne Enright relates in an excerpt from The Portable Virgin: "The foundations were dug, the bones set, and a skin of brick. grew around the rest. It was wired and plastered and plumbed. Much like myself, the first time I slept with the architect."

In a poem called "Windfall", Paul Durcan explains one of the basic appeals of home ownership: "Having a home of your own can give a family a chance in a lifetime to transcend death."

William Trevor, in his beautifully written, characteristically gloomy short story, "Broken Homes", tells how underprivileged yobs desecrate a senile widow's home.

Aisling Maguire is wittily discouraging when she writes: "With each return to the old sod I feel less at home." She recommends avoiding "the school chum who rapidly calculates the price of your clothes; the ex boyfriend thickening with complacency."

The narrator of John Banville's The Book of Evidence describes the subtleties of the emotional turmoil of stepping "through the membrane of time itself" into one's childhood home, "like a scale model of itself".

There is no space here to list all the stars of first magnitude who have made this anthology so well worth reading. Just enough room remains to quote from Paula Meehan's poem "Home", which may offer a crumb of philosophical comfort even to someone trying to sleep in a shop doorway on a wet autumn night: "The wisewoman say you must live in your skin, call it home."