Poetry: From the start (in Sheltering Places, 1978) Gerald Dawe's direct, plainspoken poems have often been generated by the counterpoint of political violence and the saving grace of landscape, by a dialectic of storm and "sheltering places", public outrage and private consolation, history's big picture and the smaller chronicles of home, writes Eamon Grennan.
Revisiting in its own unflagging way some of the same imaginative regions as he has inhabited in earlier volumes, Lake Geneva is steered by the same demotic voice - a mix of unsentimental commonsense and an undeceived, edgy alertness to the goings-on of the "moving world" - as is, or as it is remembered. With an eye for the casual socio-bric-a-brac that reveal cultural and social decay ("the bricked-up fireplace, the bedside locker" . . . "even the church is up for sale"), Dawe provides a brief inventory of a world being dismantled. Out of local remnants, he can draw large conclusions, but always in a normal tone of voice: "See. What did I tell you. It is the case/that the biggest fall is the fall from grace".
After a couple of lovely riffing pieces ('Laughter and Forgetting', 'The Buzz') that move light-footed in VanMorrisonland, after a beautifully detailed 'Evening in the Country'; and after confronting, in 'Dolphins', the contracted map of the body itself ("the transparent flesh . . . the unsubstantiated marrow,/the rough bone, the soul stuff"), the volume, in its title poem, takes us to Switzerland for a six-part meditation in compact, vivid quatrains. Here the poet is a strolling eye and mind in what seems a peaceful (if slightly forlorn) landscape, containing the past with "Daisy Miller in muslin", as well as the present with its MTV-watching kid, and the Romanian or Serbo-Croat man on his mobile - all of which is a far cry from 1974 Belfast where "A body's slumped/down a back lane". Lake Geneva - in spite of the presence once not only of the "romantic warblings" of Byron and Shelley, but also of "the History man, Edward Gibbon" - seems out of history, or serves maybe as a reminder that, inside history, there are such oases of a kind of peace: "The Alps at my fingertips,/the lake a dream,/and the terraces trim/as they've always been". Perhaps poetry might itself be such an oasis.
Like other modern and contemporary Irish poets, Dawe is, as I've implied, often a migrant from the pitiless unpalatables of history to the satisfactions of landscape, articulating the gap of irony between the empty cans of Harp and flagons of scrumpy in King William's Park, and the redemptive fact that "The hillsides are glorious/and that's as good as it gets". For me, though, what's "as good as it gets" is that there's a poet of Dawe's scrupulous tact and talent who persists in seeing and saying the world as it is, with neither fanfare nor capitulation, simply "paying particular attention/to the exact moment - whatever it was".
Eamon Grennan teaches at Vassar College. His latest collection of poems is Still Life with Waterfall
Lake Geneva. By Gerald Dawe, Gallery Press, 51pp. €10