Gerard Smyth is a writer and poet based in Dublin, Ireland.
News
Gerard Smyth’s 11th collection, The Turn for Ithaca, is due for publication by Dedalus Press in February. In these new poems, many written during the Covid/lockdown years, Smyth further explores his perennial subject of memory, its mysteries and revelations. Voices of loved ones, teachers and other poets populate a book that includes a series of poems in memory of the lost voices of fellow poets, Kinsella, Boland and Kennelly. The Turn for Ithaca also reaches out to wider issues facing our changing world of wars, migration and a growing threat to freedom of expression.
This new collection will be launched, along with Paddy Bushe’s Uncertain Passage in the Teachers’ Club, Parnell Square, in February 2026.
The Turn for Ithaca is a collection of exquisite acts of lyric generosity. Smyth’s technical accomplishment is lightly-worn, but the poems are the products of a lifetime of dedication and scrupulousness, of days ‘fine-tuning’ the art. The integrity and humbleness that infuses the work is matched only by the fiercely free spirit of a poet.
- Sasha Dugdale, poet, playwright and translator
Smyth will read from The Turn for Ithaca at this year’s Cork International Poetry Festival on May 13th.
Gerard Smyth’s memoir essay, River Gulls and City Horses: a Dublin Memoir, originally published in New Hibernia Review (Center for Irish Studies, University of St Thomas, Spring 2024 issue) was among the noted essays in The Best American Essays 2025 (edited by Jia Tolentino). A broadside print of the poem Dublin Ode, a prologue to Smyth’s memoir essay, will be added to the collection of exhibits in the Little Museum of Dublin, on St. Stephen’s Green, later this year.
A Leap Year, a suite of Gerard Smyth’s poems written during the Covid/lockdown years, will be published by Jamie Murphy’s Salvage Press later this year. This latest special project by the press (the books are handset and hand-printed) includes seven poets, ten poems in separate publications, each on the theme of the pandemic which began in 2020. Included among Smyth’s poems is Isolation, originally published on the front page of The Irish Times, on Saturday March 21st, 2020 as the outbreak took hold in Ireland and around the world. Other poets included Annemarie Ni Churreáin, Jessica Traynor and John Fitzgerald.
The Haunted Radio is a chapbook of 13 new poems by Gerard Smyth, published as the second in a series by Brighthorse Editions ( St Paul, Minnesota ). The poems cover a broad range of personal and public themes including the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, climate change and the worldwide threat to freedom of expression as well as memories of summers on his grandmother’s farm in County Meath in the year the Northern conflict began and poems inspired by two of his favourite American singers, Johnny Cash and Dylan.
Gerard Smyth has achieved a hard-won grace and fluency over many years and now writes with controlled passion and lyrical intensity, the result of a dedication to the truth of poetry that has involved a steady pilgrimage. If the work began with a dismal view of human living, imaged through inner city Dublin, it is the spare language and affectionate, though unsparing, knowledge of contemporary life, combined with unobstrusive faith in human possibility, that give the later poems a relevance, a music and a depth unique to the poetry of our time. The Mirror Tent offers poems that are mature and accomplished, their surface beauty offering, to a more concentrated reading, a depth and unselfconscious wisdom for which we must truly grateful.
John F. Deane
Gerard Smyth is inescapably a poet of the inward city. His city is one in which every day comes as news: a city of endless stories, of streets and neighbourhoods rich with associations, and a city of early memories. He gives us a city of found objects and found connections
O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award citation
We move in Gerard Smyth’s books through layered zones of experience, memory, legend and culture, between his connected homeplaces and family workplaces… 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.
Martin Dyar (author of Maiden Names )