Lucy Collins praised Gerald Dawe’s poetry for ‘the seriousness of its engagement with acts of remembering. The very brevity and precision challenges the ease with which the past can be deployed in the contemporary lyric, suggesting instead the risk-taking — both creatively and emotionally — that such investigations involve.’

(Poetry Ireland Review) The Last Peacock celebrates the lives of family and friends while viewing with a questioning and ironic eye the present-day world of conflict and crisis from his ‘eyrie’ in south County Dublin and from the River Lagan following his return to his native Belfast. In the Dublin Review of Books Richard Hayes acknowledged ‘A poetry that trusts in the power of images’ as history — ‘the near dark’ — erupts in the smallest, out-of-the-way detail to produce a powerful and cohesive collection.