Gerard Smyth’s first published poems appeared in the New Irish Writing page of The Irish Press, edited by David Marcus, in 1969 and also in The Honest Ulsterman. In the same year a collection of ten poems, The Flags Are Quiet, was issued by New Writers’ Press in a limited, hand-printed edition. New Writers’ Press subsequently published Twenty Poems, also in a limited edition, in 1970. His publishing career continued with a third small collection in 1971, Orchestra of Silence, one of a series of chapbooks brought out by Peter Fallon’s Tara Telephone – which later became Gallery Press.

His first full collection, was World Without End (New Writers Press, 1977), with two subsequent books, Loss and Gain (Raven Arts Press, 1981) and Painting the Pink Roses Black (Dedalus Press, 1986 ), before a long period during which he stopped writing poetry to concentrate on his role as a Managing Editor in The Irish Times.  He has written about the causes and effects of that cessation of his poetry life, and his later return to it, in an essay title Homesick for Poetry which is in included in the essay anthology Beyond the Centre  ( New Island, edited by Declan Meade ). The essay records Smyth’s early initiation into Dublin’s poetry world, the long pause in his artistic life and the moment the “old hankering was back” and his “period of reacclimatizing to poetry. Not quite starting from scratch but almost. Nothing was unfamiliar but I sensed in myself a different way of seeing and seizing the material that was surfacing and certainly a different, less forceful, tactic in handling language”.

This new creative episode resulted in his first new collection in 16 years – Daytime Sleeper ( Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2002), a volume of new work that marked the resumption of his life in poetry. That collection also includes various revisions of poems from earlier volumes, an idea one critic thought should have been resisted.

Daytime Sleeper was translated into Romanian and published in Bucharest in 2003. In the years since he has published six further collections with Dedalus Press: A New Tenancy ( 2004 ); The Mirror Tent (2007), The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems ( 2010 ); A Song of Elsewhere ( 2015 );  The Sundays of Eternity ( 2020 ) and The Turn for Ithaca, his eleventh collection published in February 2026.