128:, a collaborative project with the artist Sean McSweeney, commissioned by the Solstice Arts Centre based in the county;s town of Navan. The artist’s father came from the same Meath locality as the poet’s mother. Poet and essayist Gerald Dawe remarked that “ this interweaving of imaginative traffic has produced a book of fascinating contrasts between poet and artist; a sense of the continuing arresting attraction of a once familiar and known landscape redrawn and reinhabited.”
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and is represented in several anthologies, including
Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916 (Edited by Niall MacMonagle ); All Through the Night: Night Poems and Lullabies (Edited by Marie Heaney); Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (Edited by Thom Tammaro and Alan Davis);
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The poet Martyn Dyar, in his introduction to a reading by Smyth at
Limerick University in May 2019 also noted the strong urban themes in the work: “We move in Gerard Smyth’s books through layered zones of experience, memory, legend and culture, between his connected homeplaces and family workplaces …
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Smyth is a poet of uncommon and unnecessary humility; he holds his poems within strict limits, allowing them little occasion for grandeur or posture. Despite his scrupulous restraint in form, the phrasing frequently manifests a romantic richness which is in turn checked by the impersonality of voice
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did for it in prose”. When he was presented with the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the
University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota, in 2012, the citation remarked that he was “ inescapably a poet of the inward city. His city is one in which every day comes as news: a city of endless stories, of
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where he spent the summers of his childhood and teen years on the small farm on which his mother was born – and where he wrote his first poems at the age of sixteen. He has, up to the present time, maintained close contact with this ancestral ground of his maternal family's past.
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In that half a dozen acres or so of old Dublin, just beyond the few remaining pieces of the pale of the old administrative centre, Smyth has staged fifty years of imaginative journeys, ventriloquizing along the way for people who might have been resigned to oblivion.”
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His poem
Isolation, written early in Ireland’s COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and published on the front page of The Irish Times on March 21, 2020, was adapted for a Zoom choral performance by composer Philip Lawton and given a digital performance in Berlin on June 17.
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Fifty years after writing his first poems in the setting of his Meath grandmother’s farm, he returned to explore the area and his memories of it. The result was a book of poems and paintings titled
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He has participated in readings in Moscow, St
Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgart, Bucharest, St Paul, Minneapolis, and London as well as at most of Ireland's literary festivals including
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He has contributed widely to literary magazines in
Ireland, Britain and North America and has been translated into Spanish, Polish, Hungarian and Romanian. He has read his work on
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heartland of the city which has influenced, and features in, much of the poetry he has written. It is the factor in his work that prompted the poet
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In contrast to the urbanscape of his city poems, the other significant topographical location in his work is the landscape of the rural area of
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streets and neighbourhoods rich with associations, and a city of early memories. He gives us a city of found objects and found connections…”
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Gerard Smyth and Sean McSweeney at the launch of "The Yellow River" at the
Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (which commissioned the work) in 2017
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148:(Ireland’s affiliation of writers and artists) in May 2009. In 2011 he received the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from
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to say “Gerard Smyth is essentially a city-poet; lyrical, passionate, he may do for Dublin in verse what
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Accompanied Voices (Edited by John
Greening) Dublines (Edited by Brendan Kennelly and Katie Donovan).
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in 1951 and began publishing poetry in the late 1960s when his first poems were published by
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A poet of the mundane and the mysterious, a poet of the everyday and also of the eternal.
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publication, also in 1971. This early work – highly influenced by his reading of
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Smyth is a fine lyric poet...close to home in image and event
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233:Orchestra of Silence
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313:A Song of Elsewhere
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