As Terence Brown writes of the poems in Sunday School, ‘Gerald Dawe engages a narrow world in this intent collection, making of his northern past a myth of origins and survival. A persistent moral stringency quickens into vision: of hard-won individualism, “the passion that cries out of the ordinary”.’
‘Gerald Dawe speaks with a voice which is confidently individual at times and at times hesitant and suggestive with the doubtful tones of one who questions the assumptions upon which he and his culture rest.’ — Jonathan Allison, North
‘An understated, unpretentious and well-shaped collection with a delicate weight that accumulates with each reading’ — Frank Ormsby, BBC Radio
‘One might be tempted to compare Gerald Dawe to Derek Mahon. It’s true that Mahon’s tidy courtyards and terraced houses find an echo in some of the poems in Sunday School. But whereas Mahon uses poetic conjuring tricks to catch the whole of a fragmented reality, Dawe gives a solid, but distant version of his northern Protestant hinterland’ — Kathleen Shields, The Connacht Tribune
