Essays and criticism from Northern Irish poet Gerald Dawe at a moment when questions of Irish writing were almost impossible to detach from questions of nation, violence, inheritance and literary allegiance.

First published by Belfast’s Lagan Press in 1994, the book moves between poetry and public culture: Dawe writes on Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and others, but his larger subject is the machinery by which writers become representative figures. This is, whether they want the job or not.

He writes from inside Northern Irish literary culture while remaining suspicious of the demand that poetry behave as cultural evidence. The essays repeatedly worry at the neatness of categories: “Irish poet,” “Northern writer,” political poet, exile, inheritor. That refusal of easy symbolic assignment also became characteristic of Dawe’s own poetry, which critics have noted for resisting the language and logic of identity politics in favour of the ordinary, immediate and particular. 

A strong piece of 1990s Irish literary criticism, particularly for readers interested in poetry’s relationship to nationalism, the Troubles, cultural identity, place and the peculiar burden placed on writers from politically overdetermined places.

Lagan Press, Belfast, 1994. First edition paperback. ISBN 1-873687-20-6. Light age-toning and minor shelf wear to covers, with small handling marks and slight edge wear; internally clean and well-kept. Very good used condition.