New Collection of Poems by Trinity Academic Gerald Dawe

Posted on: 20 October 2014

A new collection of poems by Professor of English and Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, Gerald Dawe, was recently launched by Trinity School of English Visiting Professor, Richard Ford, at a special reception in the Senior Common Room at Trinity College Dublin. Published by The Gallery Press, Professor Dawe’s eighth collection of selected poems, entitled ‘Mickey Finn’s Air, engages with themes of memory, the passing of time and the loss of loved ones as well as offering visions of startling landscapes from south county Dublin, to Galway and east coast of America.  

Commenting on the significance of the collection, Richard Ford said: “Serious, often grave, but inculcated with such sympathy and passion and affection that any obscurity is the enemy. It’s as if what Gerald Dawe has to tell us is so vital that clarity – such a virtue – is a moral matter.”

The new collection by the Trinity poet and essayist follows his earlier work ‘Selected Poems’ (published in 2012). The latest poems invite readers to revel in how memory plays tricks with the passing of time as traces of the past are restored in the mind’s eye ‘like the torc’s beaten gold’, as well as bearing the loss of loved ones and the pressures ‘of the way things. Turning the simplicity of everyday life into moments of wonder, the poems in ‘Mickey Finn’s Air’ encompass visions of home life in ‘Déjà vu’ through the startling landscapes of a remembered Galway to the present day worlds of south county Dublin and the American east coast, where ‘everything becomes new once more’.

Professor Dawe's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies including Wes Davis, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (Harvard University Press 2012), Roberto Bertoni, Poesie Irlandesi deli ultimo decennia (Trauben 2012) and Michael Longley, 20th Century Irish Poems (Faber and Faber 2002). A new collection of essays, ‘The Stoic Man’ is also forthcoming.