Gerard Smyth was born in and grew up in the old Liberties area of Dublin, a neighbourhood whose streets and people have greatly influenced and featured in much of his poetry.  It is the factor in his work which prompted the poet Michael Hartnett to say “Gerard Smyth is essentially a city-poet; lyrical, passionate, he may do for Dublin in verse what Joyce did for it in prose”.

Another significant, but contrasting, setting which frequently appears in his poems is the rural area of County Meath where he spent the summers of his childhood and adolescent 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 maintained close contact with this maternal ancestral ground. The Yellow River, a suite of poems accompanied by the work of artist Sean McSweeney and published by the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan in 2016, is devoted to poems about and set in Meath, the place described by Smyth in his introduction to the poems as his “ childhood idyll  and playground, and later the Arcadia of my adolescence where whatever sensitivities to the natural world I possess were first incubated”. 

Smyth has worked all his professional life as a journalist with The Irish Times, initially as a news sub-editor and in the second half of his career as Managing Editor with responsibilities that included cultural coverage. He was the newspaper’s poetry critic for several years in the late 1970s and post-retirement in 2011 has been the newspaper’s poetry editor, choosing a weekly poem for the books pages. 

He was elected a member of Aosdána in May 2009. In 2011 he received the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He is co-editor, with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (Decalus Press), which was chosen as Dublin’s One City, One Book for 2014.

He has contributed to literary magazines in Ireland, Britain and North America and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, Hungarian and Romanian. He has read his work on The Enchanted Way, Sunday Miscellany and The Arts Show on RTE Radio. Smyth has participated in readings in the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayev’s house in Moscow, the Cafe de Flor in Paris, the Great Hall of Mirrors in Bucharest and Literaturwerkstatt in Berlin, as well as the Minnesota Book Awards and  most of Ireland’s literary festivals including Cuirt, the Cork International Poetry Festival, the Kilkenny Festival and Electric Picnic.