ESSAYS: DERMOT BOLGERreviews The World as Province: selected Prose 1980-2008by Gerald Dawe, Lagan Press, 222pp, £12.99
SINCE HIS first appearance in a book – under the briefly used name GC Dawe – as among the youngest poets featured in David Marcus's Irish Poets 1924-1974, Gerald Dawe has been a constantly alert and probing presence within Irish poetry, both as the author of seven volumes of lyrically taut and yet wonderfully expansive verse and also as an astute literary critic with his antenna tuned into the exactitudes of local experience and their universal counterpoints.
It is hard to read Dawe without sensing that his scholarship is always rooted within, and tested against, the bedrock of his formative Belfast experiences and yet even when writing about childhood there is a sense that, from the start, there was an acute awareness of a wider cosmopolitan culture beckoning, through music pouring forth from the cloth-faced family radio, from scratched vinyl records and from the televised Ready Steady Go!
This constant duality frames everything within these 19 essays. Here is Anthony Rafferty, the penniless poet blinded by smallpox and surviving by his wits and the fear he puts into local people in pre-Famine Mayo that they might get named in his verse if they cross him. Here is William Carlton in Ulster, a century before Joyce, pre-echoing Joyce's stated desire to "bear witness" to the reality of experience. But here also are young men in Belfast wearing black armbands not in memory of any hunger striker but to mourn the death in 1967 of the black soul singer Otis Redding. Here too is a young Van Morrison, brilliantly contextualised within the small Belfast streets where he grew up and knew from early on that if he wished to develop artistically then his first duty to himself was to leave. For Dawe literature rarely happens in a vacuum – there is always a broader political and cultural context. He brings us into the slow journey of withdrawal through which the poet Thomas Kinsella has charted "the psychic and cultural fissures which opened up in his own imagination" by firstly pitching us straight into the turmoil in Ulster in 1972, when, as a young student in the New University of Ulster, Dawe encounters the angry polemic of Kinsella's pamphlet, Butcher's Dozen, being passed from hand to hand around the campus.
This sense of never losing sight of himself as a citizen of a wider world allows his criticism to be shot through with a keen intelligence and yet remain highly readable. Much of The World as Provinceis the wonderful antidote to the prevailing school of poetry criticism that generally has the density, technical jargon and lyric grace of a motor manual for a Nissan Almeria. But this is what makes Dawe interesting to read – he belongs to no school and brings no agenda beyond intellectual curiosity and honesty. He is able to cut to the heart of Paul Durcan's early work with the observation that it explores "the nervous system of Irish Catholic life".
He hones in on relatively neglected writers such as Frank Ormsby, who catches the atmosphere of Belfast during the Troubles in a language “couched in the fluent understatements of his rural past”. He makes the case strongly for Brian Coffey’s importance without – as often happens – the case being overstated. Moving from Coffey’s 1930s generation on through the plays of Thomas Murphy and Thomas Kilroy he brings us on a journey from Mayo and Tyrone in the early 19th century to a post-Celtic Tiger and post-“Peace Process” Ireland, with a generosity of spirit that in no way mitigates against a detached critical perspective.
His new mini-collection, Country Music : Uncollected Poems 1974-1989(Starling Press, £10.99), is a deliberately brief set of "uncollected poems" written between 1974, the year when Marcus first marked him out, and 1989. They are small markers on his wider journey as a poet, imbued with his customary grace, technical control and wry intelligence.
Dermot Bolger is a novelist, poet and playwright whose Ballymun Trilogy of plays is published by New Island in April.
