GERALD DAWE, born in Belfast, taught at University College Galway for many years. Currently a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, he has published numerous collections of poetry and criticism.
This is a report from the immdediate field of action of Irish
writing. It takes the form of a poet reading others and striking
home time and again on the issues and questions that really matter.
The effect is a challenge to the whole notion of what it is to be
an Irish poet, or indeed, an Irish critic. A brave invigorating
collection.---—Thomas Kilroy, playwright and novelist
One binding theme is the question of audience, a literary public,
and how writers to deceive themselves about their significance. In
Ireland poets can still have a social role, and Dawe brings to his
thinking about literature's place his sense of the writer at odds
with society and its histories.
It is a kind of aesthetic statement about the responsibilities and
challenges of being a poet in a modernizing society like Ireland,
which has a complex and contested history. ---—Terence Brown,
author of Ireland: A Social & Cultural History, 1922–2001 and The
Life of W.B. Yeats
Gerald Dawe is an explorer, like Darwin and Humboldt, sailing way
beyond the boundaries of his own Belfast identity in order to chart
the minutiae and the ordinary design of far flung terrain,
searching for the geographical and the personal and discovering in
the process a kind of truth and courageous expression in his work
which is unique and transforming, and ultimately also reveals
itself as a true homecoming.---—Hugo Hamilton, author of Speckled
People and The Harbor Boys
Gerald Dawe's vision is uncompromisingly unromantic and
uncomfortably aware of our violent and cruel world.---—C.S. Water,
author of The Honest Ulsterman
Ask a Question About this Product More... |