BOOK OF THE WEEK: John McAuliffereviews Catching the Light: Views and Interviews by Gerald Dawe, Salmon Poetry, pp 182 . €16.00
POET AND academic Gerald Dawe, not long ago the subject of a special issue of the American journal An Sionnach, has been prolific on the home front too lately, publishing a collected essays entitled The Proper Word,a memoir of Belfast My Mother-City, a revised version of his 1978 collection Sheltering Places,a translation of Salvatore Quasimodo's early lyrics, The Night Fountain, an anthology of Irish war poetry and, best of the lot, a new book of characteristically excellent, minutely observed and interlocking poems, Points West. Here, as a sort of addendum to The Proper Word, Catching the Lightcollects recent reviews, memoir and interviews.
The book's motley format regroups and resituates reviews in personal memoir, rather than reprinting the reviews separately; it also republishes interviews that usefully fix terms by which the poems can be read. The mix of memoir and criticism works best in " Moon's Corner", in part a tribute to Tom Kilroy, which ends with an autobiographical tableau of a small town in the mid-1980s, a scene which begins: "A bunch of kids pump pinball machines in one of those anonymous hamburger joints. It was a cool damp evening without a cloud in the sky. The sound of a rock band blared out the door. A police car patrolled down the square high above which stood a statue of Christ the King. Most of the other shops and houses of the main street were shut and dark . . ."
Here, as in many of the pieces which return to Belfast (particularly those on Van Morrison and his first "naïve" encounters with poetry), there is feeling and precision in his exploration of memory and how we inhabit, and are inhabited by, places. However, many of the reviews and related travel pieces suffer from the restriction of their original form: over before they've properly begun, they make interesting connections, but omit the details and arguments Dawe has expanded on elsewhere. An exception is his review of Michael Hartnett's The Killing of Dreams: here Dawe reports on the "critical vacuum" into which Hartnett's books (and, he argues, much contemporary poetry) disappears. He then replaces that vacuum with the argument-starting (and, I think, correct) contention that Hartnett's later books ironise and reject the kind of identity politics he had previously seemed to court in, say, A Farewell to English.
Similar insights stud the interviews that round out the book. Interviewed between 1995 and 2003, when he was writing the poems of Heart of Hearts, The Morning Trainand Lake Geneva, Dawe returns to how his imagination was fostered alike by his happy, outward-looking adolescence and the terrible confining arrival of the Troubles.
The interviews also chart the way these recent books have consciously chosen European or, in Points West,American locations, as if to follow through on his consistent critique of the insularity of the Irish public sphere. His internationalism is also clear in his consistent choice of Eugenio Montale and Robert Lowell as exemplary writers, as creators of poems with "the living balance" to which his own work aspires.
Dawe recalls, in several of these pieces, sending his student poems to Michael Longley who, in response, sent the young poet a list of recommended reading, a primer which Dawe credits with educating him about the modern poem. This book, with its recommendations and its eye for unusual angles and conjunctions, is itself a sort of primer for contemporary poetry, full of examples of how to write in the modern world, and precepts which have been fruitful and decisive for Dawe's own creative work.
John McAuliffe's poetry collection Next Doorwas published by The Gallery Press last year. He co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and edits the The Manchester Review .