Balancing Acts: Conversations with Gerald Dawe on a Life in Poetry

Description

Balancing Acts gathers together interviews and conversations between Gerald Dawe and a wide cast of interlocutors between 1995 and 2020. Drawn from exchanges on television and radio, print and online media, these conversations with fellow poets, critics, journalists, colleagues and friends, are a testament to Dawe’s generous, open-hearted and open-minded approachability as a poet for whom the ‘artful way of making’ poetry has always been informed by an attitude of just ‘getting on with it’. In the same way that memory, for him, is ‘not just about the past’ but involves ‘a route into the present’, these fascinating interviews and conversations provide an insight into the poet on the go, in the process of making unforgettable poetry happen.

Contents

Preface by Philip Coleman
Introduction by Frank Ferguson
One: Origins
Two: Books
Three: Teaching
Four: Retro
Afterword by Terence Brown
Dramatis Personae

About the Editor & Author

Frank Ferguson, researcher on Irish, particularly Northern Irish and Ulster-Scots literature, currently Research Director for English Language and Literature at Ulster University.

Gerald Dawe is a former Professor of English and Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College Dublin. He has published numerous books, including The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing, The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland, In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast, Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles, and A City Imagined: Belfast Soulscapes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature.