Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles

Description

Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles, the sequel to renowned Belfast poet and author Gerald Dawe’s critically acclaimed In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast, is the evocative record of the musical, literary and artistic influences that inspired and forged Dawe’s awakening as a poet, and his career in Irish literature.

Taking its bearings from Belfast in the 1960s, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album and the energising shock of reading the great American poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, Dawe’s engagingly lyrical style has produced an evocative and memorable record of the music, poetry and culture of growing up in the northern capital.

Featuring the stunning photography of Euan Gébler, this literary memoir is a must-have for fans of Dawe’s work, a superb introduction to his world for new readers, and, in his own words, may help ‘renew Belfast and the ordinary life and lives of the city, and allow its people to overcome as best they can the seemingly irreconcilable and unsolvable conflicts of the past’.

Merrion Press received financial assistance from The Arts Council for this publication.

About The Author:

Gerald Dawe is a former Professor of English and Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College Dublin. He has published ten collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, including The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing, The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland, and In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast, which is out now in paperback. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. He lives in Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin.

Praise for Looking Through You

‘As we might expect from as strong a poet, Dawe is an exegete of great acuity. He teases out the surprising subtleties of Rubber Soul with – somehow – both the sobriety of the critic-scholar and the enthusiasm of adolescence. His prose, moreover, is distinctly poetic in its attention to particularity.’
Totally Dublin

‘I adored Looking Through You. I read it in a single day and re-read it again today. It was atmospheric, evocative, moving and contained important challenges to stereotypes…I wanted to cheer when [Dawe] confronted that awful, deliberately constructed cliche about Northern Protestants either lacking culture or having a culture inferior to their Catholic fellow citizens.’
Henry McDonald

‘Beautifully written and evocative’
The Irish Times