The Sound of the Shuttle is an eloquent and compelling selection of essays written over four decades by Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe, exploring the difficult and at times neglected territory of cultural belonging and northern Protestantism. The title, taken from a letter of John Keats during a journey through the north-east in 1818, evokes the lives, now erased from history, of the thousands of workers in the linen industry, tobacco factories and shipyards of Belfast.
Sketching in literary, social and political contexts to widen the frame of reference, Dawe offers fascinating insights into the current debate about a ‘New Ireland’ by bringing into critical focus the experiences, beliefs and achievements of an (at times) maligned and often misread community, generally referred to as Northern protestants. In making the telling point that ‘The jagged edges of the violent past are still locked within ideological vices’, The Sound of the Shuttle is an insightful and honest report based upon many years of creative and critical practice. An essential book for our changing times.
About the Author :
Gerald Dawe is a former Professor of English and Fellow Emeritus Trinity College. He has published ten collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. His latest poetry collection The Last Peacock was published in 2019; the collection of essays,The Sound of the Shuttle in 2020. He lives in Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin.
Review :
In The Sound of the Shuttle, Gerald Dawe has, in essence, written a strongly worded love letter to and about the Protestant culture of Northern Ireland, in line with the luminous writing of [Robert McLiam Wilson's] Eureka Street: “Because, sometimes, they glittered, my people here. Sometimes, they shone”.
...wonderfully written. Dawe has a fluidity in his prose that moves these pieces along at quite a rate, and a reader will no doubt wonder just how Dawe has taken them from a 1981 poetry reading in Holland to a discussion of regionalism in Ireland without the joins showing.
