I’ll put you through to Biography • John McAuliffe writes: The Irish poet Gerald Dawe has died in Dublin, after a long illness. He was seventy-two. Known to all as Gerry, he grew up in Belfast and attended the same school as his friend Van Morrison, then studying at the University of Ulster and at UCG, now the University of Galway, where he taught for a number of years. He moved to Dublin in 1992, taught at Trinity College, and co-founded and subsequently directed that University’s creative writing MA at The Oscar Wilde Centre.

Gerry is remembered by many as a great teacher. Enthusiasms and advocacy also marked his writing life. He founded and co-edited for many years the Irish literary journal Krino, and also edited or introduced selections from poets as varied as Charlie Donnelly, Padraic Fiacc, Ethna McCarthy and Gerald Fanning, as well as the outstanding Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914–1945. His Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (with Cambridge UP) was excoriated for its lack of women contributors and subjects, something Dawe sought to rectify by his support for Poetry Ireland’s 2018 day conference Missing Voices: Irish Women Poets of the 18th-20th Century. A later poem, ‘The Lost’, is less sanguine about the effects of the associated social media campaigning: ‘After the denunciation they came piling in…’.

Alongside his teaching and editorial work, he published nine books of poetry with The Gallery Press. His last book, whose title nods to Auden, Another Time: Poems 1978–2023, has just been announced as the winner of the annual O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry. Reticent, wry and acute, Dawe’s poems are often miniatures, occasionally stretching to sequences. They include recoveries of his Belfast childhood, or the kinds of encounter or shaded places which might have appealed to the Gaston Bachelard of Intuitions of the Instant or The Poetics of Space. A typically resonant poem from the ‘Resolution and Independence’ sequence runs in its entirety: ‘Qualm at Waterstone’s / Hold on, she said, / I’ll put you through to Biography / and they’ll look for you there.’


Vincent O’Sullivan, KNZM, 8 September 1937–28 April 2024 • Kirsty Gunn writes: The world turns, and in New Zealand it was already the next day when we heard news of the death of the New Zealand poet Vincent O’Sullivan. Immediately tributes started pouring in from across the international community of Katherine Mansfield scholars and writers which he had seemed, singlehandedly, to have established. His founding work on the short story writer – his scholarship and writing and the many editions of her fiction and nonfiction which he either compiled himself or inspired others to put together, including the vast project of The Collected Letters for Oxford University Press – established Mansfield as a serious modernist who had more than earned her place among Eliot, Woolf, Joyce and the rest. All of it has been achieved in a prose that is infused with his own poetic understanding and sense.

Altogether there were twenty collections of O’Sullivan’s verse – the last of which, ‘As Is’, is published this June by Te Herenga Waka University Press. He was Poet Laureate of New Zealand from 2013–15 and knighted for services to literature in 2021. I saw him towards the end of March at his home in Port Chalmers, the veranda outside the window of the light-filled sitting room in which we spoke a tumble of late white roses. It felt like summer, but in New Zealand it would be winter soon. He was funny and gracious and full of news of universities both here and there; Oxford and Otago and Edinburgh and Victoria University as it once was… These places were all walked through, doors opened and closed within them, gardens and common rooms traversed, conversations and debates and conversations listened into and appreciated – or abhorred. He was aghast, as are so many in New Zealand, to learn that Victoria University was to lose its chair in Shakespeare studies. ‘It takes only one generation not to be taught Shakespeare for the next never to have heard of him’, Vincent said. So yes, he was thinking about that sort of thing, along with the final edits on the new collection as well as wanting news of poetry in Scotland. I had a pile of recent publications for him to go through, and we talked of them, and of ballads and of Burns Singer, and of the last poem for his new collection that he’d just finished. Not one of his beautifully modulated sentences, funny and thoughtful and self-deprecating and erudite, and all at once, was wasted on the subject of his own mortality – yet mortality rested there, as he spoke, quietly breathing. It was the same sound that we hear in so much of his work, poetry and prose. As the poet and translator Michael Hulse has written, ‘Vincent’s voice is in my head’.


Different universes • Kate Farrell writes: The poet David Shapiro died on 4 May at the age of seventy-seven. Shapiro grew up in Deal, NJ, a violin prodigy in an artistic family. Deciding at ten to be a poet, he made a plan to read every book of poetry in the Newark Public Library. He kept falling in love, he reported, with new poets without giving up the earlier ones: ‘a different poet would be a different universe’. The start, perhaps, of the open-armed, wide-minded pluralism that would buoy and energize his thought and writing. Shapiro himself was something of a walking, talking library; his conversation, a ‘tapestry of quotes’, the poet-critic Don Share wrote, ‘profound and resounding… quirky and endlessly edifying’.

At fifteen, Shapiro met Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and the movement now known as the New York School – of which he would become in time a leading poet, exponent and scribe. He studied with Koch at Columbia University, as a freshman publishing January, the first of eleven books of poetry. After earning his MA at Clare College, Cambridge, he returned to Columbia for a PhD.

His New York Times obituary quotes the poet Ron Padgett: ‘David Shapiro wrote poems that sound like no one else’s, poems full of mystery, lyricism, and agile leaps of an eternally fresh spirit, with surprising humour in his unearthly melancholy.’ Shapiro also produced works of prose, including monographs on Ashbery, Jasper Johns and Piet Mondrian. He taught literature, art history, cinema and cross-disciplinary courses at Columbia, William Paterson University, and the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. A new book by Shapiro – You Are the You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School – edited by me, with a foreword by David Lehman, is due out from MadHat Press.


Singing high and low • Sunil Iyengar writes: The American poet Joseph Harrison died last February at the age of sixty-six. He was celebrated at a Baltimore memorial service in June. Participants included some of the city’s best-known poets – most of whom are associated with the John Hopkins University Writing Seminars: Mary Jo Salter, David Yezzi, Dora Malech and Greg Williamson.

In his own poems, Harrison’s use of elaborate verse patterns, rhyme and metre, and literary allusions, far from appearing schematic or contrived, could yield startling discoveries. His virtuosic range was matched by the breadth of his admirers, who included Harold Bloom, John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, and particularly Anthony Hecht. Introducing Harrison’s debut collection, Someone Else’s Name (2003), Hecht wrote:

Most of Mr. Harrison’s poems are high-spirited romps, though perfectly contained within the metrical and stanzaic schemes he so clearly enjoys deploying. He is a poet who makes the most of his forms, which, together with an unusually versatile diction (as ‘who can sing both high and low’) keeps himself on his toes, and keeps his readers alert to every change in the linguistic topography he leads them through.

Hecht connected Harrison to Philip Hoy, founder of Waywiser Press, which published all his mature volumes, culminating in a Collected Poems that came out in April this year. With Hoy, Harrison launched Waywiser’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, which he managed since 2005, eventually becoming the press’s Senior American Editor.

In a tribute to Bloom, who had taught the poet in his senior year at Yale, Harrison wrote about the liberating effects of anxiety-of-influence theory: ‘I came to believe that the best way to deal with it was to go straight at it. If one is condemned to be a ventriloquist, one might as well embrace it.’

Each of Harrison’s four stand-alone volumes includes a tour de force, a feat of strophic ingenuity and generous wit. These poems have fun with canonical figures out of English and American letters: Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, Dickens, Whitman and Dickinson among them. Each book’s title hints at the appropriation of other personae, literary or otherwise. (One is called Identity Theft; another, Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman.) For all that, Harrison was no mere ventriloquist.


Revolutionary recoveries • His long-time publisher New Directions writes of Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024): We mourn the passing of our friend Jerome Rothenberg, a pivotal figure of contemporary American poetry. It is a loss to all who knew him and his beautiful work.

‘I was Jerome Rothenberg’s editor for most of his dozen or so books published by ND’, Peter Glassgold (for decades the editor-in-chief of New Directions) said, ‘starting with Poland/1931, back in 1974. I was drawn to his work from the start, and not only because he was among the most agreeable authors I worked with over the years. There was also this happy coincidence: there is a Rothenberg branch of my family. In the matter of ancestral concerns, Jerry and I were naturally simpatico. ND published only a small portion of Jerry’s work, which was vast. His poetry was in direct line with those exuberant modernists of yesteryear, the likes of Apollinaire, Huidobro, Schwitters, and Tzara. His public readings were astonishing performances. I recall one that opened with a long, almost unbearable silence, broken at last by a prolonged, hair-raising shout. There might be music, props, and costumes, but never any sense of frivolous intent. His massive anthologies were nothing less than revolutionary recoveries. Without him the field of ethnopoetics – the study and translation of indigenous poetries worldwide and on their own terms – would not now exist. He was short in stature but, in intellect and of innovation, a giant.’


A country that no longer exists • Eva Grubin writes: Yvonne Green (1957–2024), British poet and long-time friend of Carcanet and this magazine, left us on 15 April. She was born in Finchley, London, of Bukharan-Jewish heritage, descended from those who left what is now part of Uzbekistan to flee Bolshevik persecution in the early twentieth century. Yvonne published her first pamphlet, Boukhara, in 2007. It won the Poetry Business 2007 Book & Pamphlet Competition. Her first full length collection, The Assay (Smith Doorstop Books), was published in 2010 and translated into Hebrew in 2013. It was followed by Honoured, a Winter 2015 Poetry Book Society Recommendation, in which she explored what it means to have come from a country and a community that no longer exist, in a collection examining identity and the meaning of home. Jam and Jerusalem, published in 2018, considers the human cost of war and includes a section of her translations of Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin’s poems, foreshadowing her subsequent work After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin: 1911–2003 which was the PBS Translation Choice for Winter 2011. She continued to champion Lipkin’s work, and in 2023, she published two substantial volumes: A Close Reading of Fifty-Three Poems and Testimony (the latter from his literary memoirs). In 2016, Yvonne’s extended poem ‘The Farhud: Baghdad’s Shabu’ot 1st and 2nd June 1941’ was read in the Israeli Knesset to commemorate the Iraqi pogrom bearing that name. Yvonne was poet-in-residence to the Global Foundation for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, convened two-monthly poetry groups, one at Hendon Library called ‘Wall of Words’ and the second at JW3, Europe’s largest Jewish cultural centre, called ‘Taking the Temperature’, and conducted weekly online poetry courses attended by an international audience. PN Review published Without Your Jews in 2007 and A Lawyer’s Poem in 2008. In 2010 a rare interview that she conducted with Louise Glück appeared in PN Review. Yvonne was an accomplished poet but also a lover and promoter of poetry. She embraced diverse cultural perspectives. She was an irreplaceable presence in the poetry world as a poet and advocate for poetry.


Rationality doesn’t carry you all the way • His publisher Jonathan Cape announced the death of John Burnside (1955–2024): John was amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation and published prolifically across many forms – chiefly as a poet, but also as a novelist, memoirist, writer of short stories and academic works – over a career spanning nearly forty years. He won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Feast Days (1992), the Whitbread Poetry Award for The Asylum Dance (2000), the Saltire Book of the Year for A Lie About My Father (2006), and in 2011 won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for Black Cat Bone. He wrote regularly for a number of publications including [PN Review,] the Guardian, the TLS, the London Review of Books and the New Yorker. In 2023 he received the highly prestigious David Cohen Prize, awarded biennially in recognition of an author’s entire body of work.

Born in Dunfermline in 1955, his early life was spent in Cowdenbeath and then Corby, Northamptonshire. After studies in English and European Literature at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, he spent a number of years as an analyst and software engineer in the computer industry, returning to Fife in 1996 after a long period trying to live what he called ‘a normal life’ in suburban Surrey. This superficially ‘rational’ life, however, was beset by profound personal struggles that were to some great extent due to being the son of an abusive, alcoholic father, as detailed in the remarkable and haunting memoirs A Lie About My Father and Waking Up in Toytown. John’s long-standing focus in his work was often on the irrational, not the rational – as he said in 2011: ‘Having been, as it were, mad, and lived with horror which at that moment I completely believed in, I know that rationality doesn’t carry you all the way. Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it’s very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.’

After publishing his first collection The Hoop in 1988 [with Carcanet Press, a fact omitted from most of his obituaries], he began to work with Robin Robertson. John said that this is when ‘everything changed’ for him, and they continued to work together up to the publication of John’s most recent collection, Ruin, Blossom, in 2024. […]

Having been a writer-in-residence at the University of Dundee, John became a professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, with a focus on creative writing, ecology and American poetry. His various lives as a poet, author and academic came together in his history of twentieth-century poetry, The Music of Time (2019).


Slow-moving nomad • Peter Manson writes: The poet, gardener and land artist Gerry Loose died suddenly in Rothesay on 30 April, aged seventy-six. A ‘slow-moving nomad’, Gerry was born in London, spoke with an Irish accent, and had lived in Spain, Morocco and, for many years, in Scotland. Early contact with the sound poet and publisher Bob Cobbing encouraged him to edit and hand-print his own 1970s magazine and little press, byways, publishing work by Cid Corman, Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull and many others. His selected poems, Printed on Water, was published in 2007, and a new collection, without title, is due from Shearsman later this year.

Gerry was a lifelong anti-war activist, and many of his poems reflect on the presence of nuclear weapons and their apologists in the West of Scotland. The 2014 book fault line is founded on the disconnect between the beauty of the Gareloch and the technological and bureaucratic violence of the Faslane submarine base on its shore. Every poem is divided in two, as if against itself, by the geological symbol for a strike-slip fault. The unclassifiable, funny and ultimately furious that person himself (2009) follows the wanderings of a tricksterish human-dog-fox-coyote hybrid through the post-nuclear landscapes of the US desert and Japan. Dedicated to hibakusha, the Japanese survivors of nuclear bombing, the book recalls Gerry’s visits to the Nevada and New Mexico test sites, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of these visits led to the gift to Scotland of a kaki tree, the offspring of a tree which survived the destruction of Nagasaki. It now grows in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, where Gerry was writer-in-residence for three years, often collaborating with his partner, the artist, photographer and curator Morven Gregor.

Gerry’s site-specific artwork includes ‘Sanctuary’ (2013), in Saari, Finland, a circle of spruce saplings planted so closely that their mature growth will block human (but not faunal and avian) access to the interior. On the edge of the circle, he placed a stone inscribed sanctum sanctorum, the Holy of Holies. Gerry was a rare poet who really understood the epigraphic: if your poem is literally carved in stone, it can afford to speak quietly, even anonymously.

Some of Gerry’s strangest and most beautiful writing emerges from his fifty-year fascination with ogham, the ‘Celtic tree alphabet’ of the early medieval stone inscriptions of Ireland and Scotland. As collected in The Great Book of the Woods (2020), Gerry’s ogham workings are ‘expanded translations’ of a unique kind, drawing on the treatises of early Irish poet-grammarians, on place names and the names of symbols (each ogham letter was traditionally associated with a particular tree), as well as on the features of the landscape in which the stone was raised. Every possible cue is used to find and create meaning in relation to these famously enigmatic and fragmentary texts, and each poem feels like an epitome of Gerry’s life-work, a signifying fusion of stone, tree, language and place.


The exuberance of other people • John McAuliffe writes: A memorial for Martin Amis was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 10 June, just over a year after his death at the age of seventy-three. His friends and family celebrated his work, quoting from his essays, fiction and conversation. Poetry was part of Amis’s resource as a writer. He liked to say that the Elizabethan lyric poem might be England’s contribution to world civilization, and he delighted in quoting Auden, Larkin and others while teaching fiction in Manchester at the Centre for New Writing from 2007–2011. Poetry also featured in a number of the memorial speeches, with Ian McEwan recalling that he, Amis and others tried to work out which poet was most memorable, excluding Shakespeare, by reciting lines or their memory of lines of poetry. Who do you think was most remembered? he asked the gathered congregation.

Nick Laird read the poem Amis had chosen as his favourite for an Irish anthology, Lifelines. The choice was just as surprising as discovering that W.B. Yeats topped his and McEwan’s memorability poll; Amis’s favourite poem had been William Blake’s ‘Hear the Voice of the Bard’, the introductory poem to Songs of Experience. Among the other speakers, the actor Bill Nighy read passages from the fiction (but not the ageless ‘Career Move’, the short story in which impoverished screenwriters resubmit their work to little magazines while poets quarrel over international rights with their agents…); Tina Brown remembered asking him to review a David Hare play and Amis’s response, ‘Do I have to see it?’ – theatre was not his preferred night out; James Fenton told a long, sidewinding story about the cartoonist Mark Boxer whose punchline seemed to go missing somewhere around Oxford; Zadie Smith remembered meeting him first as a student fan and then a New York dinner companion, and her continuing, almost Leavisite conviction that his were novels in which life itself still counted; the other speakers were his wife Isabel, and three of his children, Delilah and Fernanda, and Louis who, catching the delight that characterized the novels’ propulsive rhythms, remembered that his father’s ‘favourite thing in life, off the page, was witnessing the exuberance of other people’.