Gerald's poem for LookListen is called "Goodnight" inspired by his time spent living on the Trinity campus.

"I spent my first year at Trinity living in rooms. It was 1988 and I commuted between the family home in Corrandulla in Co Galway, taking the early train up on Monday mornings and returning Friday afternoons. The rooms sat above the Printing House and looked over New Square. On occasion I'd ruminate over what else was going on in the Rooms and Old Museum Building and so on, at the end of a working day. As the poem has it I started to become accustomed to the sound of music being played in a neighbouring room and one night as I overheard a guest departing with the words, 'Good Night' the poem started to take shape and moved out and about the square and all the other nearby offices and college function rooms and I had a sense of time going backwards and forwards and the feeling of that one moment distilled in the cluster of images with which the poem ends, like a picture, really, in black and white."

Belfast born poet Gerald Dawe taught for many years at NUI, Galway before being appointed lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin in 1988. A Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, he has held visiting professorships in Boston College and Villanova University, Philadelphia. He is the inaugural director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, School of English at Trinity College, having established with Brendan Kennelly the first Masters programme in creative writing offered by an Irish university. His recent collections include The Morning Train, Lake Geneva and Points West, as well as the anthology, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish War Poetry 1914-1945.

'Gerald Dawe moved from Belfast, first to the west of Ireland. He now teaches in Dublin at the heart of a Europe that informs his work as richly as it has infused, in turn, that of Joyce, Mahon and Paulin', The Guardian (UK)

Gerald Dawe 'Goodnight', from Sunday School (Gallery Press 1991)