IN
ANOTHER
WORLD
GERALD DAWE was born in Belfast in 1952. He is a graduate of Ulster University and the National University of Ireland, Galway where he taught for many years before moving to Trinity College, Dublin in 1988. He was Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College until his retirement in 2017. He has published many collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, and he is the recipient of various awards and honours, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature.
He was recently Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge and has been Visiting Professor at Boston College and Villanova University, Philadelphia. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and has been translated into many languages. His latest poetry collection, Mickey Finn’s Air, was published in 2014; Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing appeared in 2015. He lives in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin.
By Gerald Dawe
Poetry
Sheltering Places
The Lundys Letter
Sunday School
Heart of Hearts
The Morning Train
Lake Geneva
Points West
Selected Poems
Mickey Finn’s Air
Early Poems
The Night Fountain: Selected Early Poems
of Salvatore Quasimodo (with Marco Sonzogni)
Prose
The Proper Word: Collected Criticism
The Lagan Series: 2007–2015
Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing
Editor
The Younger Irish Poets
The New Younger Irish Poets
Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914–1945
The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets
GERALD DAWE
IN
ANOTHER
WORLD
Van Morrison & Belfast
First published in 2017 by
Merrion Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© Gerald Dawe, 2017
9781785371462 (Cloth)
9781785371516 (Kindle)
9781785371523 (Epub)
9781785371530 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and theabove publisher of this book.
Interior design: Sin É Design
Typeset: Sabon 11/15 pt
Cover photograph: Margaret Lonergan
Cover design: edit+ and Margaret Lonergan, www.stuartcoughlan.com
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.
–Richard Ford
For Joe and Ellison, Eon and Maria, and the rest of the gang.
If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where the immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
–Van Morrison, ‘Astral Weeks’
Beyond the back door was a view of mountainsides in the moonlight.
I let out a yahoo. The night was on.
–Jack Kerouac, On the Road
CONTENTS
