Gerald Dawe (1952-2024)
30th May, 2024
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has learned with regret of the death of poet, critic, academic and writer Gerald Dawe. He is survived by his wife Dorothea, daughter Olwen and son Iarla and we send them our deepest condolences.
He was born in north Belfast in 1952 and educated in east Belfast at Orangefield school, his formative years shaped by his mother Norma and stepdad and socialist Bob Richardson. Dawe went on to the University of Ulster and to University College Galway where he also taught for many years. In 1988 he moved to Trinity College Dublin where he was a Fellow and Professor of English (Emeritus) and established, with the late Brendan Kennelly, the first Master’s programme in creative writing offered by an Irish university, and then became the inaugural director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing (1997-2015). He retired from Trinity in 2017. He 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.
He was editor of landmark anthologies, such as The Younger Irish Poets (1982); The New Younger Irish Poets (1991); Earth Voices Whispering (Blackstaff, 2008), Irish poets and war 1914-1945; and The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018). He also wrote important critical reflections such as In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast (2017), The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2018), The Sound of the Shuttle: Cultural Belonging and Protestantism in Northern Ireland and Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles (both 2020).
A film on his life and work by Double Band Films premiered in 2023 and is available on the BBC iPlayer at BBC One - Gerald Dawe - Out of the Ordinary.
But it is as a poet that his legacy will register most powerfully. Eschewing lyrical flourish and rhetorical bombast, his aesthetic is spare, lean, pragmatic and memorable. His first collection of poems, Sheltering Places (Blackstaff), published in rough times in 1978, was a blast from the heartlands of Belfast’s urban Protestant life, in all its variety and was celebrated widely, even as it stepped aside from easy characterisation or espousing causes. His second collection, The Lundys Letter (1985), published by The Gallery Press, was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. As many collections followed from Gallery – including Sunday School (1991), Heart of Hearts (1995), The Morning Train (1999), Lake Geneva (2003), Points West (2008) – each establishing an urbane, mellow, humane idiom, mindful both of working-class origins and critical aspirations – so did other awards including 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.
Arts Council Chief Executive Roisín McDonough said: “The death of poets is felt keenly in Ireland and this is particularly true in Northern Ireland, where writers have been companions for decades across so much of our difficult shared story. Gerry Dawe’s contribution to our literature and wider culture is important and enduring, the central idea of a civic and civil life for all remains valid and necessary. He was a good friend to the arts in his native place and his absence will be felt by us and by many.”
Lip-reading
Their hands talk and all we hear is laughter.
For the entire journey this has been going on
while the rest of us tune to the playlist
or take in the customary landscape and weather.
It is a show of love, this intentness,
their eyes never leave each other for an instant.
They have such things to say.