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Remembering Gerald Dawe Trinity School of English Professor Tom Walker reflects on his colleague Professor Gerald Dawe's profound impact as a poet, educator, and founding force behind Trinity's Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing
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G erald Dawe first came to work at Trinity in 1988. Gerry – as everyone knew him – had already established himself as an important poetic voice. A breakthrough had been The Clock on a Wall of Farringdon Gardens, August 1971 from his second collection The Lundys Letter (1985). Coming across an old photo of the notorious burning of a street in his native Belfast, he later recalled that ‘you could actually see one of the old-fashioned clocks that people put on their mantlepiece was left on the wall of this house, and behind of course the houses were in ruin. suddenly the clock was telling me the poem. And I think that was the key, the door into a community or a world’. He would go on to publish eight further collections, including most recently Another Time: Poems 1978 -2023 (2023) – a body of poetic achievement recognised in his receiving of the prestigious Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry shortly before his death. Prior to coming to Trinity, he taught at what was then University College Galway, where he had gone in 1974 to undertake postgraduate research into the writings of William Carleton. He had also been prolific as a critic and editor. This included his co-founding in 1986 of the magazine Krino , which for near-on a decade understatedly placed its mix of new work by mostly Irish writers in a wider European frame. Many other editorial achievements followed, including reclamations of neglected poets such as Charles Donnelly and Ethna MacCarthy, and a landmark anthology of Irish war poetry, Earth Voices Whispering (2008). His wide-ranging critical writings likewise often attended to marginalised voices and sought to connect Irish culture to an international sense of history. Various autobiographical writing projects also evoked the pre- troubles Belfast of his youth, including its then-vibrant music scene. Alongside this rich writing life, Philip Coleman (later a colleague but then a student) recalls ‘he was a great teacher – not too formal but serious enough about what mattered’ and ‘infectious’ in his ‘enthusiasm for certain poets’. He was generous too: ‘I think every time I visited him I left his office with the gift of a book’. More unusually, Florence Impens remembers that while supervising her PhD ‘he offered me some cat food that he happened to have in his office for me to take home: he knew I was broke and had just adopted a cat and was discreetly trying to help.’ His support of her and other graduate students continued long after they had finished their theses, when he would informally meet them to discuss their various projects over lunch or a drink. He also repeatedly fostered the wider literary culture of the college. When as a student Philip Coleman co-edited College Green , Gerry not only ‘gave us a poem but also put us in touch with a number of others who appear in the issue – Robert Greacen, Michael Longley. His support for student poets and projects was constant. He never said no.’ Long after his retirement, at a symposium on Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell in 2023, he gave ‘a terrifically insightful talk – without notes that I could see. I did not realise how sick Gerry actually was at the time but he turned up, did the job, and headed off. No fuss.’ His most enduring legacy at Trinity will probably be his setting up, together with Brendan Kennelly, of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing in the late 1990s. Located at 21 Westland Row, Wilde’s birthplace, the Centre offers a base for the sixteen students selected each year to take the hugely oversubscribed MPhil in Creative Writing – the first course of its kind to be set up in an Irish university. This feat and Gerry’s tireless leadership of the Centre thereafter required a rare set of skills: not only his authority as a poet, critic and teacher, but also the ability to be an effective administrator and to persuade others of the value of what he and others were trying to create there. The novelist Deirdre Madden, longtime a colleague at the Centre, remembers that ‘he was exceptionally well organised, decisive and practical. The fact that the MPhil still works to the same basic timetable and structure that he devised in 1997, when the course was first taught, speaks volumes about how good a plan that was.’ ‘We were very, very clear in our minds’, he later noted, ‘this was a practitioners course… we were going to produce writers’ . So it surely has, with a remarkable list of alumni including the poet Conor O’Callaghan, the playwright Jaki McCarrick, and many writers of fiction, including Chris Binchy, Sean O’Reilly, Sara Baume, Nicole Flattery and Lisa Harding. Above all though, Gerry was, as Deirdre Madden stresses, ‘just such a lovely, warm, funny man’.
