Gerald Dawe’s vision is uncompromisingly unromantic, and uncomfortably aware of our violent and cruel world.
— C.S. Water, The Honest Ulsterman.
In The Morning Train this formidable vision moves from the personal landscapes of suburban Ireland through the classical echo-chamber and political upheaval of late twentieth-century Europe.
Caught between the conflicting voices of the here-and-now and the haunting past, The Morning Train finds an unerring balance in poems of an austere clarity. A quiet, elegant and eloquent voice, an eye for the suggestive detail and a mind capable of making melody out of the mundane and the personal.
— Conor Kelly, Poetry Review
The poems come into a new focus — emerging as reports from a modern Purgatory, where the architects of modern history mingle with their victims and silent conspirators — Rene Magritte, English tourists, Nazi soldiers and others inhabit the placeless heaven of the Minos Hotel. Dawe’s felicitous and compressed phrasing suggests the allegorical dimension to these notes from the land of the dead. The Morning Train is a serious and seriously enjoyable book.
— John Mc Auliffe, The Irish Times
With his dream of possible lands, his assurance that ‘there is always somewhere’, his proud foothold on the ‘neither here nor there’, Dawe soars beyond angst and apprehension to immerse himself fully in the real, the immediate, the worthwhile.
— Belinda McKeon, Trinity News
Year Published: 1999
Details: 56pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 85235 259 2
