Gerald Dawe is the author of seven poetry collections including ‘Lake Geneva’(2003) and ‘Points West’ (2008). His poetry has been translated into German, French, Italian and Japanese. A Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches English and directs the graduate writing programme, he has given readings and lectures in many parts of the world. Dawe is currently preparing a book of his essays on the Irish writer and history, including a chapter on Charles Donnelly, the Irish poet who died in the Spanish Civil War. A volume of selected prose, ‘The World as Province’ and a chapbook of uncollected poems, ‘Country Music’ are due later this year.
* Entrevista con el autor * Su lugar en la red
Summer Journal
for Brendan Kennelly
Through the porthole of a window
the blue muggy night is perforated
with the sound of foghorns.
Dogs answer each other back
and then it thunders again with spectacular effect.
The girls are sleeping in the cool apartment;
shadows like ‘planes cast over the lawn.
I’m in two minds between Tender is the Night
and the TV’s mute hectic images
which flash worldwide the breaking news
of a hillside trek and scorched villages,
the bedecked impromptu briefing.
The ignominious beetle covers oceans of sand
but the man or woman who drifts
into the sky, paragliding over our prone bodies –
family groups setting up makeshift home,
couples in their prime and past their prime,
the odd one alone stretched under the sun,
where all are vulnerable, torn this way
and that, naked, flat, in repose from
the everyday, at sixes and sevens –
is trussed and hooked to the speeding boat
and, cradled like a baby, looks down
upon us all with far-seeing love and pity.
Palm doves and swallows in the apricot
and oleander, the cacophony
of high season: poolside, Mitteleuropa
tans and in silence observes a galleon
take up the full of the Bay.
The rosé goes down like mother’s milk;
it’s near ninety, best head for cover;
in the shade, local dance music
beats through the scratchy airwaves
to you on whichever island you stand:
‘Let us dream it now,
And pray for a possible land’.
