Gerard Smyth

It is the factor in his work that 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”.

The result was a book of poems and paintings titled The Yellow River, a collaborative project with the artist Sean McSweeney, commissioned by the Solstice Arts Centre based in the county;s town of Navan.

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.” Smyth has worked all his professional life as a journalist with The Irish Times, first as a newsman and later as managing editor with responsibility for arts coverage.

– Augustus Young, The Niagara Magazine (New York) 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 sustained throughout all of these poems.