Gerald Dawe

Gerald Dawe (born 1952) is an Irish poet.

Gerald Dawe
Born	1952 (age 71–72)
Occupation(s)	Professor; poet
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Galway
Thesis	A critical study of the major works of William Carleton (1794-1869) (1977)
Academic work
Discipline	Literature
Sub-discipline	Poetry
Institutions	Trinity College Dublin

Early life

Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up with his mother, sister, and grandmother. He attended Orangefield Boys Secondary School across the city in East Belfast, a leading progressive liberal state school. He was later involved in the Lyric Youth Theatre under inspirational teacher and theatre director, Sam McCready. Around this time he started to write poems and after a brief period living in London, he returned to the North, receiving a B.A. (Hons) from the fledgling New University of Ulster (1974) where his professor was the left-wing literary critic and novelist, Walter Allen, and where he was associated with the so-called Coleraine Cluster of poets and writers.

Dawe worked briefly as an assistant librarian at the Fine Arts department, in the Central Library in Belfast before being awarded a Major State Award for Postgraduate Research from the Dept. of Education, Northern Ireland. Dawe decided to attend University College Galway (UCG) and wrote his graduate thesis on the little-known 19th-century Tyrone novelist and short story writer, William Carleton. He also started to lecture in the Dept. of English at UCG (now known as the University of Galway). His first full collection, Sheltering Places, was published in 1978, receiving two years later, a Bursary for Poetry from the Arts Council of Ireland.

Later life and work

In Galway, he met Dorothea Melvin, his future wife, and settled in east Galway with his family – Iarla and Olwen. His second collection, The Lundys Letter, was published in 1985 and was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. The collection was concerned with the cultural and social roots of his background in Belfast and of the different Irish and emigre histories of his own family, highlighted by his new life in the west of Ireland.

Around 1990, he co-founded Lagan Press with Fortnight magazine manager Patrick Ramsey (absorbed by the Verbal Arts Centre in 2013); Dawe's How's the Poetry Going?: Literary Politics & Ireland Today (1991) was the new publisher's first book. His subsequent poetry volumes, Sunday School (1991) and Heart of Hearts (1995), developed and deepened this exploration of the cultural diversity of Northern Ireland's cultural inheritance as seen through the lifestyle and customs of one family. In 1988 he was appointed Lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin and for the next five years commuted between his home in Galway and work in Dublin before the family moved to Dublin in 1992.

Dawe was appointed a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2004 and was a Professor in English and the inaugural director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing (1997-2015). He retired from Trinity College Dublin in 2017. He has also held visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University in the US as well as receiving International Writers' Fellowships from Hawthorden (UK) and Ledig Roholt Foundation in Switzerland. His subsequent collections – The Morning Train (1999), Lake Geneva (2003) and Points West (2008) – mark an important departure from the Irish settings and primary concerns of his earlier work and established Dawe as a significant European poet in both range and reference, confirmed by the publication of Selected Poems (2012), and most recently, 'Mickey Finn's Air' (2014).

He has given numerous readings and lectures in many parts of the world and during the political upheavals in former East Europe was a regular contributor to festivals and conferences organized by The British Council, among others. A volume of his selected poems appeared in German in 2007 and he has also been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, while he co-translated into English the early poems of the Sicilian poet and Nobel laureate, Salvatore Quasimodo.

Dawe has published extensively on Irish poetry and cultural issues, much of which is collected in his prose works: The Proper Word: Collected Criticism (2007), Of War and War's Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (2015), In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast (2017) and The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2018). He has lived for many years in County Dublin with his wife, Dorothea, who was chairperson of the 'think-tank', Encounter, director of the cultural resource body, Cultures of Ireland and head of public affairs at Ireland's national theatre, The Abbey, during the late 1990s and is currently a board member of the Irish Association.

Critical perspective

• John Brown. "In the Chair" Salmon Publishing 2000
• An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, and the Arts, "A Special Issue dedicated to the work of Gerald Dawe", 3:1 (Spring 2007)
• Nicholas Allen. "Introduction", Gerald Dawe, The Proper Word: Ireland, Poetry, Politics (2007)
• Stan Smith. Something Misplaced: Gerald Dawe, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (2005)
• Cathal Dallat. "Mapping the Territory", The Guardian (UK) 18 October 2003
• Katrina Goldstone. "Twilight Zones", Irish Studies Review (May 2005)
• Jonathan Ellis. "Out of Time", Metre (Winter 2001/02)

Bibliography

Poetry

• Sheltering Places (1978)
• The Lundys Letter (1985)
• The Water Table (1990)
• Sunday School (1991)
• Heart of Hearts (1995)
• The Morning Train (1999)
• Lake Geneva (2003)
• Points West (2008)
• Selected Poems (2012)
• "Mickey Finn's Air" (2014)
• "Early Poems" (2015)
• "The Last Peacock" (2019)
• "Another Time: Poems 1978-2023" (2023)

Essays

• Of War and War's Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (2015)
• In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast (2017)
• The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2018)
• The Sound of the Shuttle: : Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland (2020)
• Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles (2020)
• A City Imagined: Belfast Soulscapes (2021)
• Northern Windows/Southern Stars: Selected Essays 1983-1994 (2022)
• Dreaming of Home: Seven Irish Writers (2022)
• Balancing Acts: Conversations with Gerald Dawe on a Life in Poetry, edited by Frank Ferguson (2023)
• Politic Words: Writing Women| Writing History (2023)

As editor

• The Younger Irish Poets (1982)
• The New Younger Irish Poets (1991)
• Yeats: The Poems, a new selection (1991)
• Earth Voices Whispering: Irish poetry of war, 1914–1945 (2008)
• The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018)

As Co-editor

• Across a Roaring Hill: the Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland

with Edna Longley (1985)

• The Poet's Place: Essays on Ulster Literature & Society

with John Wilson Foster (1991)

• Ruined Pages: Selected Poems of Padraic Fiacc

with Aodan Mac Poilin (1994; new edition 2011)

• Krino: the Review, 1986–1996, an anthology of modern Irish writing

with Jonathan Williams (1996)

• The Ogham Stone: an anthology of modern Ireland

with Michael Mulreany (2001)

• The Writer Fellow with Terence Brown (2004)
• High Pop: the Irish Times column of Stewart Parker

with Maria Johnston (2008)

• Dramatis Personae and other writings by Stewart Parker

with Maria Johnston and Clare Wallace (2008)

• The Night Fountain: Selected early poems of Salvatore Quasimodo

with Marco Sonzogni (2008)

• Heroic Heart: A Charles Donnelly Reader

with Kay Donnelly (2011)

• Ruined Pages: New Selected Poems of Padraic Fiacc

with Aodan Mac Poilin (2012)

• Beautiful Strangers:Ireland & the world of the Fifties

with Darryl Jones and Nora Pelazzi (2012)

Ethna McCarthy Poems with Eoin O'Brien (2019)

Prizes and awards

• 1974-77: Major State Award (Northern Ireland Department of Education)
• 1980: Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Poetry
• 1984: Macaulay Fellowship in Literature for The Lundys Letter
• 1987: Hawthorden International Writers Fellowship (UK)
• 1999: Ledig-Rowholt International Writers Fellowship (Switzerland)
• 2000: Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Poetry

Distinctions

• 2004: Fellow, Trinity College Dublin
• 2005: J.J. Burns Visiting Professor, Boston College
• 2009: Heimbold Chair, Irish Studies, Villanova University, Philadelphia
• 2013: The Moore Institute Fellowship, NUI, Galway
• 2016-17: Visiting Scholar, Pembroke College, Cambridge (UK)

Recent interviews

• 2014: Andrea Rea http://www.drb.ie/essays/good-remembering
• 2015: Dave Lourdan http://humag.co/features/gerald-dawe
• 2015: Philip Coleman http://www.icarusmagazine.com/may-2015/2015/9/19/featured-a-conversation-between-gerald-dawe-and-philip-coleman Archived 21 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine
• 2016: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitywriters/writers/gerald-dawe/
• 2016: Eleanor Doorley http://thelonelycrowd.org/2016/09/26/balancing-acts-gerald-dawe-in-conversation-with-eleanor-doorley/

External links

• Website
• The Poet's Chair (Irish Poets)