Gerald Dawe
Articles by Gerald Dawe
2022
2021
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Literature
The Pleasure Principle
A poet born to wealth and privilege whose gift miraculously survived
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Literary Life
A Vanished Bohemia
A compelling memoir of Aidan Higgins and a mode of literary life now gone
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World Literature
On the High Wire
John Berryman: a university poet in a society not much interested in poetry
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Her True Face
Sylvia Plath presented an image to the world – brilliant student, stellar emerging poet and active, outdoor girl – while within she was deeply troubled…
2020
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Looking Through You
Below is an extract from Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles by Gerard Dawe, published this summer by Merrion Press at €18.
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The Power of Concentration
A new study provides a view of Seamus Heaney as a poet who broke through to the hearts and minds of the general reader, precisely…
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World Literature
The Struggles of Old Zeus
Is art predicated upon the artist’s psychology? Is the cost of high achievement inevitably a compromise with mental health and the destruction of human bonds?…
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Irish History
Neither West Brit nor Little Irelander
Irish Protestant identity has always been a more complex and various business than is suggested by the image of a Big House aristocracy enduring terminal…
2019
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World Literature
Wartime Voices
After the deluge of books, documentaries, exhibitions, conferences and commemorations marking the course of the First World War, there is something affirming in returning to…
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Among the Dead Men
JG Farrell had a curiosity that spanned various cultures and periods, a wicked sense of fun, a keen, unrelenting eye for the hypocrisy of particularly…
2017
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World Literature
A Life of Noticing
The mastery of American English which we associate with Richard Ford’s fiction – the subtle not-saying, the deflection of painful emotional realities into half-said or…
2016
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Irish Literature
The Virtual Republic
John Hewitt was uncomfortable with the Northern state and frustrated by his inability to make contact with ‘his own people’. His verse is inflected with…
2015
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Irish Literature
Some Northern Poets
The lives of the Catholic nationalist community in the North, but also its wider migrations and fate in the fledgling new Irish Free State and…
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Irish Literature
A Fierce Eye
At the heart of Derek Mahon’s new prose collection there is a lot of truth-telling going on about the artist’s life. It is a far…
2014
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Irish Literature
New Poems
These four new poems by Gerald Dawe are from Mickey Finn’s Air, to be published later this year by Gallery Press
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Irish Literature
Plunkett’s City
Walks through Dublin’s streets and slums, and through the leafy avenues of the airy and salubrious suburb of Kingstown, punctuate James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, casting…
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Irish Literature
Ulster Polyphony
Northern literature and culture, if it was seen to exist at all before the 1960s renaissance, tended to be blackened by a caricatural view of…
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Irish Literature
The Listener
The gifts that those who knew him would expect to encounter, intelligence, wit and playfulness, are in ample evidence in Dennis O’Driscoll’s posthumous prose collection,…
2013
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Irish Literature
Outlasting Fashion
The notions of rule and order that Richard Murphy inherited from his colonial administrator father have been put to different use by him in fashioning…
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World Literature
Birds, beasts and flowers
DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind…
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Irish Literature
Interrupted Lives
Fate dealt harshly with both JG Farrell and Stewart Parker, two hugely gifted Irish writers who died in their forties
2012
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Irish Literature
LITERATURE IS ALWAYS NOW
The idea of retreat or retrenchment might surprise those who see nothing but good in the present, with its ceaselessly productive creative arts, but Derek…