The Proper Word

One binding theme is the question of audience, a literary public, and how writers to deceive themselves about their significance. In Ireland poets can still have a social role, and Dawe brings to his thinking about literature's place his sense of the writer at odds with society and its histories.
It is a kind of aesthetic statement about the responsibilities and challenges of being a poet in a modernizing society like Ireland, which has a complex and contested history.

Gerald Dawe is an explorer, like Darwin and Humboldt, sailing way beyond the boundaries of his own Belfast identity in order to chart the minutiae and the ordinary design of far flung terrain, searching for the geographical and the personal and discovering in the process a kind of truth and courageous expression in his work which is unique and transforming, and ultimately also reveals itself as a true homecoming.

This is a report from the immdediate field of action of Irish writing. It takes the form of a poet reading others and striking home time and again on the issues and questions that really matter. The effect is a challenge to the whole notion of what it is to be an Irish poet, or indeed, an Irish critic. A brave invigorating collection.

Gerald Dawe's vision is uncompromisingly unromantic and uncomfortably aware of our violent and cruel world.