`It appeared that nobody who mattered was capable of being explained," wrote Elizabeth Bowen in an essay of 1946. "Thus was inculcated a feeling for the dark horse." It's a feeling shared by the poet and critic Gerald Dawe, who finds himself drawn all the time to creative misfits, all those who duck out of predetermined categories such as "Irish poet", baffling critical streamlining. These are the necessary thorns in the side of received opinion. In the essay (on Seamus Heaney) which gives this new collection its title, the achievement and prowess of Ireland's best-known literary figure are fully acknowledged, while a thought is spared for the maverick others, "the stray dogs and dark horses, snuffling in the high grass, doing very much their own impractical thing".
Some of Dawe's dark horses have a Northern Protestant (but never an Orange) colouring - those like the poet John Hewitt, for instance, who wrote against the grain of inherited ideologies. One of Dawe's aims, indeed, is to separate his native Belfast from the image of dourness and philistinism that has bedevilled it ever since John Keats walked there from Donaghadee in 1818, and complained about "the sound of the shuttle" which, with all its toilsome connotations, marked off the whole region as a place utterly alien to the romantic spirit. Still on the subject of how the North is regarded - Dawe allows himself to get fed up with the "pissed-off, disenchanted" stance of Tom Paulin (for example), despite his admiration for Paulin's intellectual rigour and moments of poetic felicity.
Gerald Dawe is an enterprising commentator, averse to cant and guff, impatient with preconception; and these essays are pungent and provocative, whether they're applauding under-appreciated writers such as the anti-traditionalists MacGreevy, Devlin and Coffey, or noting the failure of the 19th-century Co Tyrone novelist William Carleton - for all his expertise and imaginative richness - to break away from various stereotypical images. They make invigorating reading, as they go about the business - not of rounding up, since that suggests regimentation - but of extending a sympathetic understanding, and a critical relish, to a bunch of doughty strays.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic