At first reading, the world and the language of Gerald Dawe's The Morning Train appear strikingly ordinary - holidays abroad, the world on TV, formative childhood incidents recalled on leisurely Sunday afternoons. Appearances can be deceiving, however. A vital endnote alerts readers to the complicated allegory that underpins the book's opening sequence "The Minos Hotel", advising us that "Minos, a son of Zeus and Europa, was lord of Crete. After his death he became judge of the Underworld."
Suddenly, 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 constantly suggests the allegorical dimension to these notes from the land of the dead - the hotel is "a heaven of sorts", inhabited by "our vibrant souls".
In Section II, Dawe memorably exploits cliche and the latent metaphor of ordinary language. In "Promises", Dawe treasures housing estates and gated apartment blocks named Valhalla, Haven and Greenfields - these ordinary places' resemblance to their heavenly names is slyly rejected. In "Resolution and Independence", Dawe playfully sees himself disappearing, before his time, into the books section, and an afterlife of sorts:
"Qualm at Waterstone's:/Hold on, she said,/I'll put you through to Biography,/And they'll look for you there."
Throughout The Morning Train, the basic code of Dawe's language is that death and change powerfully shadow our most mundane rituals and ways of living. Dawe searches for a meaningful response to this perception of the world and also questions conventional responses to life and mortality. In "In Ron's Place", a typical scenario emerges: the speaker's sickness consigns him to "the guts of a week" in bed, a condition of inertia that is closely observed - "the brassy taste of stomach juices", "energy levels/at an all-time low". The living world outside the speaker's window is hardly better off - "where logs dissemble into cobwebs/and dust". In this netherworld of sickness, the speaker sleeps on a hearse-like train, "the wheels at my head, the door double-locked". Waking with a jolt, the poem concludes as the speaker wonders where he is, in this world or the next one: "Are you still there?/Is the sun still out?"
The Morning Train is a serious and seriously enjoyable book; it is also heartening evidence that Thomas Kinsella's work has found a fitting heir in Dawe's grim humour and ramifying wordplay.
John McAuliffe is an academic and poet. He has been shortlisted for the RTE Poet of the Future award, the winner of which will be announced on February 11th.