Custom House Studios with Westport Arts Festival 2008 are hosting a book launch and reading from the new poetry collection Points West by Gerald Dawe at the Creel Restaurant Westport Quay on Thursday October 9 2008 at 8pm. Guest Speaker on the evening Thomas Kilroy.
Gerald Dawe’s seventh collection spans the globe, from Belfast to Boston and Berlin, from a Mediterranean island to his home in County Dublin, and from the irretrievable past, full of half-remembered things and distant echoes, to fugitive voices caught up in the turbulent beginnings of the twenty-first century. Points West is a book of emotionally forceful meditative poems — their plain style and direct expression by now an unmistakable signature.
Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast in 1952. He has published seven collections of poetry: Sheltering Places (1978 ), The Lundys Letter (1985 ), Sunday School (1991 ), Heart of Hearts (1995 ), The Morning Train (1999, Lake Geneva (2003 )and Points West (2008 ). His other publications include The Proper Word: Collected Criticism, My Mother-City (both 2007 ) and Catching the Light: Views and Interviews forthcoming from Salmon Publishing. He was Burns Visiting Professor at Boston College (2005 ) and is the incoming Heinbold Chair (VillanovaUniversity, 2009 ). A Fellow of Trinity College Dublin he is Senior Lecturer in English and Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing. Gerald Dawe lives in County Dublin.
Thomas Kilroy was born in 1934 in County Kilkenny and now lives in County Mayo. His novel, The Big Chapel, was short listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Heinemann Award. His plays include The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, Double Cross, Ghosts (after Ibsen ), The O'Neill, The Seagull (after Chekhov ), The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, Talbot's Box, Tea and Sex and Shakespeare, The Shape of Metal, My Scandalous Life andPirandellos (December 2007 ).In 2004 Thomas Kilroy received the Irish Times/ESB 'Lifetime Achievement' Award.
