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 an Dylan.
The latest edition of New Hibernia Review (published by Center for Irish Studies, University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota) includes an extract from River Gulls and City Horses, a Dublin Memoir, work-in-progress by Gerard Smyth.
This extract deal’s with the poet’s childhood and adolescent years growing up in
Dublin’s Liberties, opening with the arrival of his mother in that quarter of the city:
“When my mother left her home in Meath in the late 1930s to live and work in Dublin’s Liberties (the oldest part of the city, and so named because it was once independent of the municipal authorities and free from taxes), she entered a world removed and different from the rural community that had nurtured her. In some ways it was not so removed or different”.
Gerard Smyth is among contributors to the recently-published David Marcus: Editing Ireland ( Stinging Fly Press ), an anthology of tributes and recollections to honour the founder and editor of New Irish Writing which began in The Irish Press newspaper in 1968. It was in Marcus’s page that Smyth’s first poems were published in January 1969. His essay on Marcus, A Golden Age, begins
It is very tempting to call it a golden age of Dublin journalism. But many
of us who experienced it would do so. It was an era of much crossover
between the literary and journalistic in the city’s newspapers. Central to that memory is the role of David Marcus in The Irish Press – first as begetter of the weekly New Irish Writing page and then adding literary editor to his responsibilities on Burgh Quay.
'Isolation'
Gerard Smyth’s poem ‘Isolation’ featured on the front page of the Irish Times early in Ireland’s first pandemic lockdown in 2020. A hopeful look at the unusual and difficult circumstances into which the entire world had been thrown, the poem was subsequently tweeted, republished and translated many times and was later given a live Zoom/Facebook performance in Berlin on June 2020 in an arrangement for choir meeting digitally by composer Philip Lawton.
-
Share