Gerald Dawe’s final collection of poetry, Another Time, offers readers the great gift of an opportunity to delve deeply into the poet’s work. The volume features 107 poems drawn from across forty-five years of Dawe’s career, and includes work from nine previous volumes, as well as the substantial eponymous section of new poems.
Read chronologically, the poet takes his readers on a journey from 1978’s Sheltering Places up through 2019’s The Last Peacock, before gracing readers with his most recent pieces, Another Time’s glance backward affords us a chance to accompany Dawe across the years as he explores history, identity, justice, and human empathy in Ireland, globally, and personally. One of the central themes of Dawe’s work is Northern identity, a subject “Names” from Sheltering Places delves into, recalling the loud-mouthed smoke signals of Heaney’s “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”, as Dawe writes: They call this ‘ the Black North’, black from the heart out. It doesn’t matter about particulars when mouths mumble the handy sayings and day-in minds tighten [….] (Another Time 42)
Here, Dawe comments on the unfathomable darkness of the Troubles and its impact on human relationships… In “Secrets,” from 1985’s The Lundys Letter, Dawe observes the stern Protestantism which inflected so much of Northern Irish history: “My puritan fathers, for instance, // stumbled from separate beds / and found their place // under the staunch gaze / of monumental heroes, frozen // stiff in the act of sacrifice” (44). However, while Dawe’s work is informed by the past, he just as often demonstrates a sense of the present, even to prescience. In “To James Joyce” (written on Bloomsday in Galway, 1987), the poet wittily addresses his great forebearer in Irish letters:
Just thought I’d drop you a line
given the fact that I happened to be walking
the same streets you once did
//
What would you think of the new estates
hugging either shore, or the Telecom mast
picking up our fervent calls across the water
to a son that’s gone, or a daughter?
I tip my hat as you pass by,
a preoccupied man in shabby gutties.
(70 – 71)
Throughout the collection, Dawe demonstrates his facility with the private, the personal. In the pensive lyric “Heart of Hearts,” the title poem from his 1995 volume, he writes: “There is a man on the platform / who is waiting. […] // he will stand apart, muttering to himself, / and in his hands a carrier bag, rolled-up umbrella / like a ton-weight, and he will look intently / at each passerby because he never knows.” (80).
This capacity for crafting a speaker who perceives the heart of others in the midst of his personal reverie is perhaps the strongest characteristic of Dawe’s work, rendering the poems accessible and genuine, as well as arrestingly direct. One of the finest examples of this insight comes in part 6 of “Fellow Travelers,” the volume’s final selection from Points West (2008), a set of vignettes seemingly about the tourist gaze: In this heat, though, I’m overdone: the noon-day glare, best known for mad dogs and Englishmen, in the dusty streets of Baghdad now a boy straps on his real-life mission and, in some mountain pass, in Afghanistan, the next wave readies itself as cries of laughter, shouts of grief, mingle and merge in the noonday sun. (134-135)
Though prefaced by Dawe’s newest poems, Another Time might be best read chronologically, with Part Two first, letting these older poems lead us to the present, so they are informed by the forty-five years of work that came before. Regardless, Part One’s seventeen newer pieces are a delight, showcasing the talents of a poet who will be deeply missed for the profound compassion and insight found in his many lines. The first of these newer works, the ekphrastic “1969” (for Ellison and Joe Craig), also looks to Northern Ireland’s dark past, questioning in numerous ways the violence and outcomes of the Conflict. In the poem, the speaker considers a photograph from 1969, and wonders about it all:
How strange is that?
Sunshine and a burnt-out shop,all the folks getting by —
the soldier, the family circle.
(Was there something
else just out of shot?)Life goes on amidst all the ruin:
the photographer’s snapped
this on such a perfect day.
What then? What then?
(15)
Though clearly a poem ruminating on the past, Dawe brings to bear his trenchant insight, drawing us to consider the fraught time’s import for Ireland’s present. Similarly, in the three-part work “Revenant,” the poet ponders the afterlives of those from conflict; in “THEIR WEDDING PHOTOGRAPH” (part 2 of the poem), he writes: “as the war winds down, / all will step out of frame / into whatever the future holds” (19). This meditation on what the future holds catalyzes the entire section of new work, perhaps acting as an epigraph to Part Two’s historical expedition across Dawe’s legacy.
The sense of the poet looking back over his life and making ready for the great journey comes clearly into focus in this first section. Part One includes seven poems in dedication to friends and family. A trio of poems to brother poets who have passed away is included: “Make Believe” to Derek Mahon; “Worry Beads” to Brendan Kennelly; and “The Tower” to Thomas Kinsella.
Certainly, Another Time’s concern with existential temporality is reinforced not only in the volume’s title, but in the epigraph to its title poem, from Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Vastness blurs and time | beats level” (35). In Part 5 of “Another Time” Dawe shares with us what can be read as the sense of the artist gently coming to rest, after long work, when he writes:
What was I dreaming about —
another time, the start of a poem,
one of those that stray off
into an ambulance siren,
the street sweeper’s rapid machine,
the heavy, baffling engines
as the first flight breaks cover?
for the life of me I can’t recall.
(38)
Dawe’s volume of final poems is a great gift to those who knew him, as well as those who wish to know him, and should not be overlooked. While with sadness we mourn the passing of friend and poet, he has shared with us his wisdom over and over in Another Time. And if we wonder about the future, in his kindness, Dawe offers to go with us:
Heading west is not so easy this day —
We hesitate in the wind and squally rain,Catch a breath and guide each other across
The unbreakable bridge of fast, foaming waters.
(47)
— Brian McCabe, Reading Ireland
