Review
Sean McMahon suggests you go out of your way to get a copy of this excellent collection…
- The World as Province
- Lagan Press
Being Irish
The sorely missed P-Patrick Campbell once published Short Trots with a Cultured Mind, a collection of hilarious essays.
It was a deliberately comic title but it could soberly be applied to Gerry Dawe’s collected prose of 1980–2008. The range is wide and deep, guaranteed Irish and shows, not unexpectedly, a great appreciation of fellow poets, like Paul Durcan, Brian Coffey and Thomas Kinsella.
Born in Belfast in 1952 and experiencing the cataclysm of that volatile city, perhaps Dawe needed a Joycean exile, if only to Connacht, in order that the ‘world as province’ should replace the ‘province as world’. There is nothing provincial about his writing, as he ranges from blind Raftery of Killeaden to Les Murray of Bunyah. His gantried homeplace has not been neglected; there are excellent portraits of Van the Man, Derek Mahon, Frank Ormsby (by adoption) and the beset town itself. The meaning (and burden) of being Irish continues to fascinate as may be seen in his account of Tom Kilroy’s diptych Double Cross (1986) with its two ‘Irishmen’ Lord Haw-Haw and Brendan Bracken. These 19 essays are beautifully presented by Lagan Press. Beg, borrow…
