Gerald Dawe (1952-2024)
Serious, often grave, but inculcated with such sympathy and passion and affection that any obscurity is the enemy. It’s as if what Gerald Dawe has to tell us is so vital that clarity — such a virtue — is a moral matter.
— Richard Ford
Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast in 1952 and educated at the University of Ulster and University College Galway where he taught for many years. In 1988 he moved to Trinity College Dublin where he is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emeritus). He has also held visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University in the United States as well as being Visiting Scholar at the Moore Institute, NUI, Galway and Pembroke College, Cambridge.
His first collection of poems, Sheltering Places (Blackstaff) was published in 1978. His second collection, The Lundys Letter (1985), published by The Gallery Press, was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. Other awards include Arts Council Bursaries for Poetry, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Fellowship, the Ledig-Rowholt International Writers’ Award and Moore Institute Fellowship. In October 2023 he was announced as the recipient of the 2024 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award.
His subsequent poetry collections, 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) and The Last Peacock (2019) have all been published by The Gallery Press. Another Time: Poems 1978-2023 which brings together Gerald Dawe’s new collection of poems with an extended selection from his eight previous books published by The Gallery Press is was published in September 2023.
He has published various prose collections including Of War and War’s Alarms (2015), The Wrong Country (2018) and the trilogy Northern Chronicles (2017-2021). His other publications include The Night Fountain: Selected Early Poems of Salvatore Quasimodo (with Marco Sonzogni), Earth Voices Whispering: Irish war poetry, 1914-1945 (both 2008) and Ethna MacCarthy Poems (with Eoin O’Brien, 2019). He lives in Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin.
‘These poems are a joy to read. Concise, never wasteful of word nor emotion, they have heft that belies their brevity. They are intense and are alive in their telling craft – a craft which manifests itself in the careful assembly of sounds and pace within the poems.’— Patrick Lodge reviewing The Last Peacock (Agenda).
Gerald Dawe Titles
-
Another Time: Poems 1978-2023
€14.50 – €22.50 -
The Last Peacock
€10.00 -
The Morning Train
€10.00 -
Sunday School
€10.00 -
Points West
€11.95 – €18.50 -
Mickey Finn’s Air
€10.00 -
Lake Geneva
€10.00 – €17.50 -
Heart of Hearts
€17.50
Videos
“Refugees”, read by Gerald Dawe.
‘A Shower of Rain’ Gerald Dawe.
‘Snap’ by Gerald Dawe.
‘Argentina’ by Gerald Dawe.