Cahal Dallat: Poet, Musician and Critic
- London-based poet, critic, musician (b. Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, educ. QUB)
- founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project marking 19c London artists’ colony where Nobel-Prize-winning poet/dramatist WBY grew up
- 2019 Joint Writer-in-Residence (with poet Anne-Marie Fyfe), Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory NC
- 2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship at University of Texas, Austin
- 2017 Causley 100 centenary/2017 musician/poet-in-residence at Charles Causley’s house in Cornwall, writing and performing new settings for Causley poems
- poetry awards include Keats-Shelley Prize and Strokestown International Prize
- plays bandoneon, musette-accordion, traditional flute, mando-fiddle, soprano-sax, clarinet, piano etc
- resident musician at Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour #poetrymondays from 1997
- panellist on BBC Radio 4’s weekly arts magazine, Saturday Review from 1998
- writes on Irish fiction & drama for literary journals including TLS and Guardian
- teaches creative-writing masterclasses, poetry seminars, and annual residential courses
- lectures on literature/music/history
- joint words+music events with Anne-Marie Fyfe (to whom he’s married)
- John Hewitt Society committee-member, involved in John Hewitt International Summer School in the Antrim Glens from 1988, and in Armagh from 2003
Neither object lessons nor exhibits in an esoteric cabinet of curiosities, Cahal Dallat’s poems, in Beautiful Lofty Things, spring from quotidian items and artefacts that connect poet and reader with an eclectic mix of people and places, from present-day Rajasthan, Slovakia, Kansas City and North Carolina via London, Montmartre and Morocco, to growing up in the Antrim Glens, and back through the unlikeliest of family heirlooms to Belfast and Ballycastle in the twentieth century’s first half… Buy Beautiful Lofty Things from Salmon Poetry
Buy The Year of Not Dancing (publ. £12.99) + free Morning Star (publ. £4.95) inc. p&p for special web price of £12 via PayPal here
Diary
- Wed 22 Nov, 7pm–9pm, £20: Poetry Masterclass with Cahal Dallat for The Charles Causley Trust
- Thu 14 Dec, 7.30pm: Inaugural WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture by Professor Roy Foster, introduced by Cahal Dallat
- Feb 2024, date tbc: Yeats Bedford Park and the Journey to the East, lecture by Cahal Dallat
- Current/Recent
- Fri 27 Oct—Sat 16 Dec, £280: Between the Lines #14, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat
- Mon 30 Oct, 7pm: Stanza 2 Open Mic Zoom with guest Cahal Dallat
- Sun 8 Oct, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: WB Yeats literary walk with Cahal Dallat
- Fri 8 Sep—Sat 28 Oct: Between the Lines #13, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat
- Wed 14 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm: Bedford Park Festival celebrates Yeats’s Birthday: Only My Dreams with special guest Marina Warner, plus London and local poets hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat
- Tue 13 Jun, 6pm, Yeats’s Birthday: Online Talk: The Yeatses, Morris and Kelmscott House by Cahal Dallat
- Fri 3 Mar—Sat 29 Apr: Between the Lines #12 – focus on form#2, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat
- Sat 28 Jan, 11am, Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats smartphone poetry-places launch with Jeremy Vine, all welcome, hosted by: Torin Douglas, with YeatsBedfordPk project organiser Cahal Dallat and guests Anne-Marie Fyfe and Polly Devlin @: the green triangle outside St. Michael & All Angels (opp. Turnham Grn Tube), Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX
Featured
- Beautiful Lofty Things featured:
— On The Salmon Poetry Podcast
— On RTÉ’s Poetry Programme with Nithy Kasa and host Olivia O’Leary
— In Chiswick Calendar, by Bridget Osborne
— In Write Out Loud, Greg Freeman reporting from Bedford Park Festival 2022 - Giant featured as Guardian Saturday Poem
- The Year of Not Dancing featured as Guardian Saturday Poem
- The Year of Not Dancing featured as theThe Poem of the Week
- Listen to The Year of Not Dancing and other poems on Poetcasting
- Interview (& audio) on culturenorthernireland.org
- Poetry Couples in Magma 40
Reviews
Beautiful Lofty Things reviewed by
The Year of Not Dancing reviewed by
Features
- On John Hewitt
— A Strange Bird: John Hewitt, Difference and Belonging in The Glynns, No. 50 - On Robinson Jeffers:
— Robinson Jeffers: Poet of the Glens in The Glynns, No. 49
— Foundation Stones: Robinson Jeffers and Poetry in the North of Ireland, in The Hopkins Review #10.3 - On Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity in Manipulating the Reader, New Ohio Review #19
- On The Yeatses, Morris and Kelmscott House, Lecture Recording, William Morris Society (also in William Morris Society Magazine for society members)
- On Charles Causley: (as Causley Trust centenary musician/poet-in-residence at Charles’s former Cyprus Well home)
— Possession: A Poet’s Things
— Charles Causley’s Irish Influence
— Musing on Poetry and Place
— Literature Works interview with Cahal Dallat - On Harry White’s Music and the Irish Literary Imagination and The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, Wasafiri #62
- On Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower Master in The Collection, The North #47
- Via YouTube
— Out of my Time: John Hewitt on Brexit, COVID, shifting borders and altered identities — Gerald Dawe, Heather Richardson and Cahal Dallat read and discuss Hewitt’s poetry at the John Hewitt Festival of Literature and Ideas
— The Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse — Misha Glenny and Cahal Dallat in conversation at the John Hewitt Festival of Literature and Ideas
— Literary London: presenter Nick Hennegan talks to Cahal Dallat about WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project and the John Hewitt Festival of Literature and Ideas
Giant
The one exceptional thing about him—
as we worked late August nights on import
software for Italian racing-bikes for his friend Italo,
percentage landing charges, demurrage, lire
conversions and freight forwarding—
was there was nothing exceptional about him
if you ignored the tallest-man-in-the-country
thing, maybe in-the-world back then, and maybe
his giant-size civility. And that we’d take
our son to watch him at Sunday soccer
though basketball was his first love, or to see
him play a circus giant in the Merrick film.
(Yes, in-the-world, probably—a Melbourne chain
had him open ‘giant’ hypermarkets across that huge
continent). And that his VW driver’s seat
was well in the back, his racing-bike a pair
of penny-farthing ‘pennies’ with eleven gears.
Our children found out giants today
far from overbearing could be wry,
awkward and funny—like, but not at all
like, anybody else. And even when he sat
right down on our low-profile sofa
he couldn’t avoid talking down to us.
The papers when he finally passed on
would focus mostly on the ten pallbearers.
Winner, Keats-Shelley Prize, 2017
Love on a Rock
Who could tell them now – out in the world,
its plethorae of arc-lights, halogens, discos —
those lighthouse children with listening eyes,
now the last tin cup, plate and fork
are stowed in the last canvas bag under
a fo’c‘sle and rowed with their owner
to the supply port, gold watch and severance.
But you’d know them then in utility brown-
and-cream rooms, wiser in their generations
than world-children; at jonquil Formica tables,
sucked HB stubs at poise to take down
wireless PO boxes, or describe collections
and hobbies to comics; devouring a quarter’s worth —
in a morning — of Dandys and Beanos and Judys
since the weather last faired; or dwelling
on all missing lightkeeping men …
know them playing ecksy-oseys in winter,
hopscotching the one slab of cement
between storm door and fairweather jetty:
and know by their manners when bible-people
came with flasks in baskets and Old-Testament
crayoning books, or hikers with tripods
to put the rock in their textbooks and maps.
You might see them still, if you’re careful
on city-hall or tower-block stairways, left
foot tiptoed on an absent stiletto from years
navigating anti-clockwise tight spiral stairs:
or find them when everyone’s gone,
rocking against the emulsioned wall
in the dark of a seventh-floor office
and the sound that you hear isn’t them
but the thinness of baby-seals’ weeping
or the contralto with auburn-grey wisps
chanting the bright stormy sea as she folds
the cold grey sheet down and Trinity-
House-issue blankets, tells them never
to fret. Or their lilting along to the small-
gansied man with pipe-grime under
his left index-nail rippling a hornpipe’s
slow triplets on a Breton concertina.
And you’ll know them in truth for children
of the rocks, for they’ll have preset
the Xerox’s counter right up to the thousand,
lid-up and nothing on the glass, eyelids
numb on the margin of sleep as the phasings
of light take them home to the beam-room again.
Winner, Strokestown International Poetry Competition, 2006
Listen to Love on a Rock and other poems on Poetcasting
