GERALD DAWE
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Ireland
gdawe
My Mother City
Golden Age of Belfast
remembered
in 'My Mother City'
Belfast’s golden age of music and literature in the late 50s and 60s has been vividly documented in a social history and memoir from poet Gerald Dawe, in the crisply written book, My Mother City.
Dawe sees leading Irish cultural figures of today - such as playwright Stewart Parker, writers Brian Moore; Padraic Fiacc and music legend Van Morrison - more than just cultural references as he maps the impact of Belfast on their artistic development. He also gives a riveting insight into the city’s more innocent and less estranged period pre-Troubles.
My Mother City, published by Lagan Press with assistance from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, is essentially a book of two halves. In the first, Dawe has shown an enviable accessible style to describe the mood, tone and culture of what was a fairly swinging city of his time, and along with it a succinct, detailed explanation of the human geography of the city. So much so that if a visitor from outer space needed to quickly understand the city and its people, Dawe’s book would be recommended reading.
The second part of the book ‘Bit Parts’ is a much more autobiographical, an intimate account of childhood and family reminiscences from the North Belfast man, who now lives in Dun Laoghaire. Here he illustrates some of the origins of his own poetry but also endearingly describes his own family cultural blueprint and his descendency from Huguenot stock on his mother’s side.
The younger Dawe, like many a man in his youth, was a music fanatic and he writes about this time spent at Belfast’s famous Maritime Club where young swingers from all over the city came to worship at the font of rock and roll, jazz and rhythm and blues.
But the real star of the show in the book is the city itself and Dawe admits that despite living in the Republic of Ireland for most of his adult life, his home city is still very much in his blood.
“Belfast is one of those places that gets into your blood and never really leaves you,” says Dawe.
“I felt that the time was right to look again at what I had written about the city that I knew, where we really had little thought or opinion about politics or religion and were more influenced by culture such as music, art and literature.
“I feel very privileged to have been part of a very vibrant and creative arts community in Belfast at that time and also to have experienced a very mixed circle of friends from all backgrounds.”
Dawe reveals his interest in the challenge that is before Belfast, in particular, how it can adapt to a more culturally diverse population today, underlining the liberal roots he has retained.
“I’ve tried to give an updated statement of how Belfast was in my time so that this period is not lost or forgotten about. It’s important for people to know that we weren’t always consumed with being Protestants and Catholics. There was a relaxed, liberal mood in the city that undoubtedly gave rise to some of our most creative talent.”
The paper back is available at all good book shops and online from :
Sebastian Barry
on Gerald Dawe’s ‘My Mother City’
This is a short, vivid and essential book. It contains two sparkling essays that are resonant and true. There were things here that I both recognised and wondered at in a way I hardly expected – the best experience you can have reading a book.
I almost said ‘mere book’, as in the Elizabethan phrase ‘mere Irish’, that sounds so derogatory to our ears, but in fact was used in the sense of ‘pure’.
It’s the pure drop, the pure Dawe. Dismay, devilment and anguish. And tenderness.
These essays touch on many things, football, Belfast sunlight, great grandfather Billy Chartres, looking astonishing and astonished in his photograph, not quite as at ease as the Bulldog on his knee (one leg thrown up to prop the dog), a grandmother sitting out the Blitz in her own fiery rage, such temporary poetries, shadow souls of Belfast that were also Gerry’s ancestors.
He tweaks them from their shadows to make no point except that they were there, so that no summarising account of Protestant Belfast might erase them, though many such accounts do.
A singing and honest prose poem to how things were, not how things should have been, or indeed how things were said to have been.
So that it surpises you with this Davian (the adjective for Dawe, I don’t know?) tenderness, pushing back those ideas of the narrowness of the Protestant Belfast life, hammering newer, truer templates out of the lives of the saints, Van Morrison, Stewart Parker, Padraig Fiacc, Ciaran Carson.
Belfast as shadowlands, a long and perpetual tomorrow after some St Bartholomew’s Day. About people trying to answer that aiding question in all the troubled centuries of Ireland, how to live in it?
Gerry has returned again and again to Belfast, in body and in poetry. But he has also returned Belfast to us, if we read this little primer of the grammar of a certain sort of Belfast life. That’s why it should be read by everyone.
Coming from that city of many Protestantisms, Gerry’s true religion strikes me as a combination of music, football, the cutting wind on a magnificent sea, a thousand quotidian things. Perhaps he would be willing to be burned at that stake.
That’s maybe why I like Gerry Dawe.
Nostalgia, a much harder word in Greek than English. The sickness of the desire to return home.
The God of his Belfast is Van Morrison, the angel of his North is Padraic Fiacc – a new iconography.
Van Morrison to Belfast as Bob Marley to Kingston, Jamaica.
It is a strangely recognisable sequence of things, that surprisingly echoes and almost fits the iconographies of my own childhood in Dublin. But things are changed around, as in dreams.
When Gerry left Belfast he found his family ‘did not belong anywhere else in Ireland’, a very painful discovery no doubt, but a useful one to a writer.
This book gives a sort of new light to read his beautiful poetry by. There is trauma here, and the strange decorum that arises from trauma. ‘Sundered brick sliding across the street’ he writes, in a description of a bomb blast in ’74. One of his own St Bartholomew’s Days. Another reason to go. He emigrated to Galway.
The book is itself. There are a thousand things to say about it, but it says them all perfectly itself anyway. I can’t do it justice, it does itself justice. But you will find moving and startling riches in it. There are thousands of books published every year, few will have the force of this. Billy Chartres is in it, Gerry’s great grandfather with his forsaken banner, as he is in Gerry, but also everything else that makes Gerry Dawe the Belfast person he is. A sort of city in himself. A human city with open streets, memoried buildings, lit by the civic lights of poetry and love.
***
Astral Weeks is also a long goodbye, both to [Morrison’s] younger self and to the city of his youth, a prelapsarian Belfast untouched by bomb or bullet. It was recorded just as the Troubles began, and remains, alongside Derek Mahon's poetry and Gerald Dawe's memoir, My Mother-City, one of the most tender evocations of a straight-laced and hard-edged city, whose more progressive youth were embracing the creeping bohemianism of the times.
- Sean O Hagan The Guardian
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Ireland
gdawe
