Katrina Goldstone writes: A month and a half before he died, I wrote to my friend the poet Gerry Dawe proposing we do a book together. A few times over our nearly thirty-year friendship, we’d talked about joint projects where our interests intersected. But it never happened, probably because Gerry was so prolific and disciplined that he was always on to the next book or books before the proverbial ink was dry on the last one. I knew in my heart that we would never publish Beacons. In truth the idea was more a ploy, to give him something to plan for. He responded with his customary enthusiasm and encouragement: ‘ … I think I’ve said all I can say academically and personally on other writers. You would do a great job on Beacons. Go for it.’
In the last years of his life, and through a grinding round of chemo and radiotherapy, scans and multiple doctors’ appointments, he sustained his extraordinary productivity despite the inauspicious circumstances. Work was a lifeline in testing times, during which he rarely complained. He told me that a UK publishing monitor had sent him a listing of all his books since 2017, seven in total. These included Politic Words and Balancing Acts, two important additions to his remarkable intellectual legacy. Another Time: Poems 1978-2023 gave us the chance to consider the expansive range of his poetic oeuvre over forty years. When I teased him about fame, coming on foot of the BBC documentary Out of the Ordinary, screened just last February, he texted: ‘Fame is not my game! Just the work.’ And that singular devotion to ‘the work’ and the life of the mind, the avoidance of easy pieties and modish pronouncements, a refusal to follow fashions or be the crowd-pleaser is what truly marked him out. He was sceptical of easy praise, hyperbole, plámás or adulation of any kind, a legacy of his Northern Protestant roots. Persisting in intellectual endeavour, his feverish open mind led him from one project to the other. The visual arts was a passion: he loved Chagall and Miró. In the last year he had become fascinated by the life and work of photographer Lee Miller. He also returned time and again to Belfast, his childhood and growing up there acting as a constant imaginative engine for his thinking. Galway and Dublin were ever-present in his cultural topography, Trinity College and the Oscar Wilde Centre constituting an intellectual famil, too. At the heart and centre of everything was of course his own family, ‘a stabilising force’, his beloved Dorothea and Olwen.
Beacons was to be about literary mentors, the writers and the books that light up a dark path and the deep well of friendship that buoys up a writer when things are going badly. Gerry performed this function for many, including myself. Without Gerry’s steadfast loyalty, I would never have persevered with my book Irish Writers and the Thirties. He read many chapter drafts over the years. And I know he generously cast his eagle editorial eye over the manuscripts of many other writers. He had of course made his own survey of the Thirties – and its impact on Irish writers – decades earlier through essays on Ewart Milne and Charles Donnelly, found in the significant volume The Proper Word: Collected Criticism – Ireland, Poetry, Politics, edited by Nicholas Allen. Indeed he had persevered from the 1970s to 2011 to do justice to Donnelly, paying homage in Heroic Heart: A Charles Donnelly Reader, with Kay Donnelly. There was disappointment that the war poetry anthology Earth Voices Whispering garnered little critical notice when it was first published in 2008. It was of course ahead of its time in retrieving Francis Ledwidge and a number of women poets such as Eva Gore-Booth from the penumbra of obscurity. Not initially acknowledged as the pioneering act of deep retrieval that it was, it is now recognised as a landmark volume of war poetry in Ireland. ‘Getting on with it’ despite the obstacles was a mantra.
Gerry had a knack for getting straight to the heart of the matter, be it in literature, in moral judgement or simply in the way to lead an honourable and meaningful life. His was a carefully honed, deeply crafted gift for noticing and celebrating fleeting moments, in his poetry, elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary, taking the daily grain of life, the walk with the dog, the seagull on the pier, the details of married domesticity – imbuing them with magic and wonder: what one appreciation called ‘the poetry of the everyday’. That was certainly true, but one should not miss the artful beneath that simplicity, the personal or broader themes interwoven with the grand sweep of history. He was at ease thinking globally too, reflecting on turmoil, displacement and violence, the inexorable tug of the past, its legacy in the present day. The poem ‘Quartz’, which he dedicated to me, imagined the arrival, from Mitteleuropa to Belfast, of women like my grandmother, and his own great-grandmother, capturing the dogged bravery implicit in those journeys. He also honoured such migrants in a practical way, donating a limited edition of the poem, designed by Joe Vanek. It was sold with all proceeds going to the Irish Refugee Council – literature and social responsibility going hand in hand, as it so often did with Gerry. Whether it was encouraging emerging writers, lecturing students, founding a poetry magazine, lending an editorial eye, he was always interpreting the role of writer, as imbued with an obligation to give back, the notion of responsibility and the civic duty inexorably bound up in the social role of the poet. That is something I always associate with Gerry. Not just that the writing must be done to the very best of one’s ability but that it should be shared in many contexts and with many audiences, be it through cultural magazines, a library talk, a conference or lecture, a podcast or radio programme. To engage beyond the silo: that was his aim. A writer must take responsibility to spread ideas both complex and nuanced and encourage intellectual endeavour as a bulwark against the crass or reductive. even, perhaps, the malevolent.
At his packed funeral ceremony in the National Maritime Museum were the clusters of people who had benefited from that expansive attitude, who came to honour and praise him. There were writers, former students, artists, musicians, librarians, neighbours, fellow fans of his beloved rugby, a truly eclectic bunch, reflecting not just his diverse interests and never-dimmed curiosity but a devotion to a man who had touched so many people’s lives, in both profound and small ways. One of his last public events was held in Dun Laoghaire Lexicon library, to mark a donation of his own extraordinary collection of books. On that night, we got to follow in miniature, the trajectory of what first sparked a young boy’s imagination and led him to the dream of becoming a writer himself. A rather outlandish ambition for a young man coming from the place and milieu where he was born – North Belfast in the early 1950s. Writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sylvia Plath lured him down the twisting road of a life dedicated to literature, both the writing of poetry and work as teacher and mentor to so many. Much will be captured in Cultural Belongings, a digital resource where his work will live on.
Gerry did an amazing amount behind the scenes to support writers as well as being the instigator of so many literary and cultural initiatives over decades. Reading the introduction by Frank Ferguson to Balancing Acts I was struck by the dizzying array of landmark groups and publications he had been behind. Balancing Acts was a window opening on the breadth of his concerns since he began writing in the 1970s, and highlighted brilliantly how he articulated his role as cultural enabler and critic.
In an era when the superficial can be elevated as profound, he cleaved to a now old-fashioned idea that deep and varied reading count, and that the writer has to be an engaged reader of books, to be open to a plethora of ideas and viewpoints. To that end a cherished corner of my bookshelf hold books given to me by Gerry. At Christmas, or on my winter birthday or indeed at other times through the year, the parcel or padded envelope would arrive addressed in fountain pen in his elegant handwriting, sometimes with a little address label on the back, and inscribed with an affectionate dedication within. In the last year alone, despite the travails of his cancer treatment, the parcels kept coming – Saving Freud by Andrew Nagorski, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, Monsters by Claire Dederer, The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World by Richard Cockett, plus a book on Erika and Klaus Mann.
His adored wife Dorothea and his daughter Olwen had the opportunity to return the great love he felt for them, in the devoted care and support they gave him throughout his illness. After he died Dorothea gave me Versions, a book of his poems in translation, launched on April 30th, just shy of a month before he died. For the first time, a book of Gerry’s gifted to me is without an inscription. The parcels may now cease but his influence – and that legacy of generosity and steadfastness – will carry on for ever.
As Gerry wondered in the poem ‘All Things Considered’, where did all the time go?
17/7/2024
