Northern Windows/Southern Stars is a valuable, accessible and thought-provoking gathering of essays by the distinguished Irish poet and Professor Emeritus, Gerald Dawe. Re-tracing the issues and questions of poetry and politics in the Ireland of the 1980s and 1990s, the collection provides energetic and unexpected views of one poet's critical readings, including the work of several overlooked poets of the time. While offering fascinating insights into the early processes of reimagining the canon of Irish poetry, Northern Windows/Southern Stars is full of thoughtful and telling reports from a very different Ireland at the point of significant transition by the turn of the millennium.

Gerald Dawe was born in 1952 in Belfast and attended the universities of Ulster and Galway. He taught for thirty years at Trinity College Dublin. Since his first collection Sheltering Places appeared in 1978 he has published over twenty books of poetry and non-fiction. He lives in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin.

Contents: Brief Confrontations - A Gritty Prod Baroque: Tom Paulin - Northern Windows/ Southern Stars - A Question of Imagination - How's the Poetry Going? - Invocation of Powers: John Montague - Potent Music: Yeats's Legacy - Critical Mass - The Parochial Idyll: W. R. Rodgers - An Unmoved Mind: John Millington Synge - Our Secret Being: Padraic Fiacc - Breathing Spaces: Brendan Kennelly.