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    Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles
    Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles
    Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles

    By Gerald Dawe

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    About this ebook

    Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles, the sequel to renowned Belfast poet and author Gerald Dawe’s critically acclaimed In Another World: Van Morrison and 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 Gëbler, 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’.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMerrion Press
    Release dateAug 5, 2020
    ISBN9781785372834
    Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles
    Author

    Gerald Dawe

    Gerald Dawe is an Irish poet and Professor Emeritus and Fellow, Trinity College Dublin. He has published nine volumes of poetry including Lake Geneva (2003), Points West (2008), Selected Poems (2012) and Mickey Finn’s Air (2014). He has also edited Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry, 1914–1945 (2008) and the Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018) and published several books of literary essays including Of War and War’s Alarms (2015) and In AnotherWorld: Van Morrison and Belfast (2017). He lives in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin.

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      Book preview

      Looking Through You - Gerald Dawe

      LOOKING

      THROUGH

      YOU

      By the same author

      Poetry

      Sheltering Places

      The Lundys Letter

      Sunday School

      Heart of Hearts

      The Morning Train

      Lake Geneva

      Points West

      Selected Poems

      Mickey Finn’s Air

      The Last Peacock

      Prose

      The Proper Word

      Catching the Light

      Of War and War’s Alarms

      In Another World

      The Wrong Country

      The Sound of the Shuttle

      As editor

      The Younger Irish Poets

      Earth Voices Whispering

      The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets

      LOOKING

      THROUGH

      YOU

      Northern Chronicles

      GERALD DAWE

      With photographs by

      Euan Gébler

      book logo

      First published in 2020 by

      Merrion Press

      10 George’s Street

      Newbridge

      Co. Kildare

      Ireland

      www.merrionpress.ie

      © Gerald Dawe & Euan Gébler 2020

      9781785372810 (Cloth)

      9781785372827 (Kindle)

      9781785372834 (Epub)

      A CIP catalogue record for this book is

      available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

      Typeset in Sabon 11/15 pt

      Cover photograph courtesy of Bobbie Hanvey.

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

      Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

      For Dorothea

      At certain periods of history, it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise couldn’t be retained by the mind.

      Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      Pedals

      Player

      Simmering Like Wasps

      Great Victoria Street Baptist Church

      Ladder

      Staircase

      Reflection

      Flower

      Splash

      CONTENTS

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      PREFACE

      ONE

      TWO

      THREE

      FOUR

      FIVE

      SIX

      SEVEN

      EIGHT

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      SELECT READING

      PREFACE

      There was a warren of sheds and yards wedged in behind the backs of the houses in an urban island between two well-stocked avenues of traditional red-brick family homes in north Belfast. I knew the district well. Friends lived there, there were shops we all visited for ‘messages’, a delicatessen and hairdresser, and long-gone stores like Roycroft’s and Billy Duddy’s. But in the 1940s this little annex had been part of the extensive preparations throughout Northern Ireland for the US Army and ‘D’ Day. My uncle and his mates as young teenagers used to cadge Lucky Strikes and chewing gum from the GIs passing through by war’s end. Farther down, along the shore side, prefabricated houses had been built to accommodate many hundreds of people as a result of the Belfast Blitz in 1941. Others, returning home from evacuation, found, billeted in their homes, officers en route to the European battlefields.

      When I was about nine years old this district became my stamping ground, as Richard Burton’s magisterial voice-over was broadcast on the BBC’s The Valiant Years (1961), Churchill’s history of World War II. Ex-servicemen could be seen in their ceremonial blazers heading off to the local serviceman’s club, the British Legion. Our house retained the black-out blinds and I recall empty ration books in a press. War was general. Whether we liked it or not, World War II and its legacies influenced much of what happened in the 1950s and well into the 1960s, if not beyond. Behind that wartime screen of film, dress and demeanour, the voices and lifestyles of an older generation played out its own declining destiny.

      ‘Uncle’ Oswald, a close friend of my grandmother, loved accompanying on piano her singing and recitations of verse; with his dapper Aquascutum overcoat and short dashing moustache, he wheezed, at times badly, as a result of a German gas attack at the Front. When I worked for a time in Belfast’s Central Library on Royal Avenue, a tall spindly older man would often be seen across from the library steps addressing skywards in a clipped Northern Anglo tone where ‘Monty’ (General Montgomery) and his troops were moving on an imaginary map. El Alamein, I think it was. Sitting outside the Arcade bar downtown most Saturdays, a partially sighted veteran played a harmonica and sought alms from those busily heading to the cinema, pubs and dancehalls.

      Relics of wars – statues, regimental flags, commemorative plaques outside churches, remaining blitzed sites – the whole business of destruction, sacrifice and loss were embedded in that civic world. So it is really no surprise that in the back bedroom, which was my retreat from all this, the wall next to my bed was covered with other symbols, very different signs of the time.

      At first it was English football league tables with little name tags which you could move up and down according to the Saturday results, alongside a double spread of the team I supported (Spurs). This was soon to be replaced as motorcycles gleamed in all their polished power – AJS, Honda, Suzuki. And you could readily imagine riding those mighty machines, with their all-consuming engine sound, because at the weekends leather-clad young men and their girlfriends shot past our house on their way to TT races, or their versions of them, on the hilly avenues above us leading towards Belfast Castle. If you were out walking along the Shore Road you could hear the music pumping out of a little café where the rockers hung out. It was all a little bit too much for me; I don’t know why. But then The Shangri-Las were mourning for ‘The Leader of the Pack’ and Twinkle’s ‘Terry’ hit of 1964 was blasting out too, a strange, lurid, death-haunted song which became known by genre as a teenage tragedy song: ‘He rode into the night, accelerated his motorbike / I cried to him in fright, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.’ One afternoon, just below us, a young motorcyclist, attempting to overtake a van on the rising camber of the road, was struck by an oncoming lorry and died instantly. Before his funeral, fellow bikers arrived in numbers and circled before placing their right boots at the very spot.

      From then the bikes disappeared from my wall and the faces of my burgeoning musical heroes of the time appeared in their place and would take over my teenage years. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Small Faces became not only figures in magazines, heard on the transistor radio and seen on the black and white TV, they were ‘live’ in the various clubs and venues in downtown Belfast.

      But first it was The Beatles. I recall sitting on the bus home from Orangefield, my new school across town, as a solitary and temporarily liberated cow went blattering down Donegal Square, along by the front of the City Hall. It was a bizarre sight indeed for busy-busy work-a-day Belfast, but off it went – into May Street and beyond. Later that night, as we sat having our tea, I mentioned what I saw earlier that day. ‘It’s because The Beatles are here; someone’s done that for publicity’, my mother interjected without rhyme or reason. It was 1963. The Beatles were indeed in Belfast.

      Looking Through You begins there and then, listening to The Beatles and becoming aware of the shift in gear which Rubber Soul heralded: a more complicated lyric for a more questioning world. What followed was the discovery of inspirational American poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia

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