INTERVIEW Poet Gerald Dawe looks back

MAYO BOUND Gerald Dawe in the famous Crown Bar on Great Victoria Street, Belfast.Pic: Bobbie Hanvey

A journey through change


Ciara Moynihan

Gerald Dawe is very much looking forward to his return to the west. These days, the Belfast-born poet and professor of English is flat out in Dublin, where he now lives. It is end of term, which means it is marking time at Trinity College. It’s hard to snatch a minute in the day for anything else. Soon though, very soon, he’ll be back in his beloved Galway – but not before he stops off in Westport for a reading from his new collection of poetry, ‘Selected Poems’, on June 7.
This latest publication spans 35 years of Dawe’s poetry, and the selection of poems it contains chart the poet’s life from his early years growing up in north Belfast; through his life in Galway, where he moved in 1974; on to his life in Dublin, where he and fellow poet Brendan Kennelly established a Masters in Creative Writing at Trinity College; and his travels to Italy, Switzerland, Poland and America.

Belfast dreams
Dawe, who turns 60 this year, was immersed in a world of creativity and independent thinking from a young age. He went to the same school as Van Morrison, Brian Keenan and David Irvine – Orangefield Boy’s Secondary School in east Belfast – and it was here that his love of writing and poetry was fostered and encouraged. He speaks particularly fondly of the school’s ‘visionary’ principal, John Malone.
“He [Malone] created this school very much along the lines of a liberal, progressive school. As students, we had our own parliament, our own theatre company … a lot of music went on in the school, what used to be called a ‘hop’ was played there, and there was lots of writing. It was kind of like a ’60s dream.
“There was a teacher called Sam McCready who encouraged a small group of us, including Brian [Keenan] and others … We went on to have lives in academia or as writers, or as activists.
“I started to write back then when I was in my mid teens, and this particular teacher was very supportive and encouraged me to seek out other writers who were living in Belfast at the time. One of them was the poet Michael Longley, and he was very influential in my early stages. He got me to read different poets I ordinarily wouldn’t have come across. That really started me off.
“The school also encouraged, through John Malone, writers to visit – which was way ahead of its time. … One of the guys that came in was a playwright called Stewart Parker … and he spoke a lot about [American] poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. He was hugely influential too.
“Just to get us thinking about poetry or writing as an option was incredible. … Where I grew up in north Belfast, the notion that there would have been a poet or a playwright living across the road, it would have been inconceivable.
“In a way this was all just before the balloon lifted and writers like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon became internationally recognised. Belfast was really at the beginning of a rising curve.
“A lot of us who were politically interested had a liberal-minded, left-wing, social-democratic view of things. And then The Troubles broke, and that became a life then for people for a quarter of a century.”
Dawe was just 17 when The Troubles started in the north, and it had a huge impact on his life. 
“I come from a Protestant background, but as a young fellow I had lots of Catholic and Jewish friends, and non-religious friends. We all used to hang out together, and we used to go to dances together, we used to party together, we used to go on holidays together. It was a very mixed group.
“But by the early ’70s all that changed. I used to walk girls home over to west Belfast and it never was a problem, but when The Troubles really started to dig in, that kind of freedom disappeared. I mean you’d take your life in your hands … Belfast became a very dark and dangerous city. People didn’t go out after 7 or 8 o’clock at night. It was pretty grim … It wasn’t the same city that I had known growing up.”

World of the west
Dawe left Belfast in 1974 after he won a Major State Award, which funded postgraduate studies. While all previous recipients had used the award to fund study somewhere in the UK, Dawe broke the mould and moved to the Republic to study in Galway.
He had visited Galway the previous year – he travelled there with a play he had written for an Irish-language drama group – and he had fallen in love with it.
“I thought Galway was absolutely beautiful. I remember I jokingly said to my mates ‘I’m going to move down there sometime’ never thinking I was really going to do it, but I did it the following year.”
For a young writer it was, as he says himself, ‘an extraordinary experience’ to be living in a city so identified with the great names of the Irish Literary Revival, names like Yeats, Synge and Joyce.
During his first few years in Galway, Dawe lived in a small apartment on Abbygate Street, around the corner from Bowling Green, where the family of Nora Barnacle – James Joyce’s wife – had connections. He was a huge fan of Joyce, and this connection to his hero drew him closer still to his new home. “I was just amazed at the notion that I was walking around the streets that he had once walked around,” he admits. This sense of wonder at treading the same ground as the literary giant then inspired one of his poems, ‘To James Joyce’.
The city was also where Dawe met his wife, Ballina native Dorothea Melvin. Gradually, after publishing his first book, ‘Sheltering Places’, in 1978, he began to tune himself into a new way of life. “Through my wife I learned a lot about the west of Ireland. We travelled a lot along the western seaboard. I discovered Clare, Connemara and Mayo – it was like a whole new world opening up to me … In many ways the west of Ireland gave me a life, an opening into another world.”

Flux and change
That new world started to reveal itself in Dawe’s second book, ‘The Lundys Letter’, which came out in 1985. His new life enabled him to ‘look at two different places at the same time’. “I was looking back to Belfast and the Belfast that I had known growing up and the place it had become through The Troubles, but I was also discovering this new world.”
Dawe and his wife had two children in Galway, Iarla and Olwen, and they remained there, in Corrandulla, throughout the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. In 1988, Dawe took up a position at Trinity College Dublin, and he commuted between the east and west coasts for four years – a Sisyphean task that he refers to simply as ‘a killer’. The family eventually decided to up stakes and move to Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, in 1992. 
It has been noted, and he agrees, that Dawe’s body of poetry is “like a journey”, not only from north to west to east Ireland, but also a voyage through history – his own changing history and that of the world around him. “Underpinning the poems’ chronological order is an autobiographical journey,” he says.
For Dawe, the new collection has allowed him to survey a span of his work ‘impartially’, ‘objectively’. “One of the things I can see quite clearly is a journey in which you discover the places you are in, and the history attached to those places. The poems are almost like observations on the way people live and how we see what we are living … poetry is a way of accessing that history. You can see history through things.”
He is interested in how history impacts on the small things, the minutiae – and what the small things in turn reveal about history. He is concerned with patterns and “the rhythms of change”, and he says that many of the poems in this new collection chart that change.
By observing moments in time, he says, such as “what people are wearing, what they are saying and how they say it, the way houses are built and what happens in people’s homes”, a history is captured. “If you’re attentive, and you watch and listen and see things, you actually can start to discern how life changes.”
‘Selected poems’ also contains poems exploring larger historical changes and shifts, such as World War II and the scar it left on European society, and inward migration to Ireland, the subject of his poem ‘Quartz’.

Poet and queen
Another moment of great change, and one of great significance to Dawe, was the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland last year. He was among those selected to meet the monarch when she visited Trinity College. “It was a very strange experience,” he says, laughing. “I come from quite an irreverent family,” he chuckles, “who take a certain kind of wry view on authority and state power. I know certainly that if my great- great-grandfather was around, he would be smiling, because he was an old-style, 32-county unionist!”
Although perhaps initially a little underwhelmed by the prospect of meeting Queen Elizabeth, Dawe’s fascination both with small detail and with moments in history eventually won out. “I was amazed at, first of all, the colour of her eyes, which were so bright. And her complexion, which was extraordinary for a woman of her age.
“As I was introduced to her, she was told ‘This is Gerald Dawe the poet. His office is the room in which Oscar Wilde was born.’ She looked at me momentarily, obviously trying to think of something to say, and said ‘How very interesting’ and moved on to the next person!
“It was quite a moment though. My late mother was very pleased by it, and indeed walking though Dun Laoghaire afterwards my hand was shook by people I didn’t know – not because I’d written any poems, but because I’d met the Queen!”
Then Dawe’s voice grew more serious, more reflective, more contemplative, as he meditated on the symbolism of the royal visit and on the historical shift it could be seen to signify.
“It was good to see that, at long last, a dignitary from another country with which we’ve had such a tormented relationship can come here. It’s not a problem for us anymore. And that’s a relief.”

Gerald Dawe will read from ‘Selected Poems’, at The Creel Restaurant, The Quay, Westport, at 8pm on June 7. The evening is being organised in conjunction with The Custom House Studios. There will also be guest readings from ‘Selected Poems’ by Susan Kelly, Thomas Kilroy, SeΡn Lysaght, John McHugh and Ger Reidy, and music by Laoise Kelly (harp). Admission is free.