Painting the pink roses black

Painting the Pink Roses Black

Literature & Fiction

Smyth, Gerard

Poetry

Dedalus Press

Southword 42: New International Writing

Cotter, Patrick

Lee, Wes

Hastings, Shelley

Spaight, Breda

Literary

Southword Editions

"At the heart of Gerard Smyth's entire oeuvre is an intriguing duality. He is an urban poet who emerged as an artist from the distinctive Dublin modernism of Michael Smith's New Writers' Press, yet his work over the years has accumulated all the characteristics of a compelling, Kavanagh-like, story-telling narrative method."   So begins Thomas McCarthy's insightful Introduction to this generous selection of four decades of Geard Smyth's poetry, in which his intimacy with his nativy city ("Smyth's synagogue", as McCarthy calls it) is balanced by a fascination with the wider imaginative world of Art and of "many journeys", both outward and interior.  Gerard Smyth was born in 1951 in Dublin, where he still lives. His poetry has been published widely in literary journals in Ireland, Britain and the United States, as well as in translation, since the late 1960s. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Daytime Sleeper (2002), A New Tenancy (2004) and The Mirror Tent  (2007), all from the Dedalus Press. He is a member of Aosdána.

The Fullness of Time

"At the heart of Gerard Smyth's entire oeuvre is an intriguing duality. He is an urban poet who emerged as an artist from the distinctive Dublin modernism of Michael Smith's New Writers' Press, yet his work over the years has accumulated all the characteristics of a compelling, Kavanagh-like, story-telling narrative method." So begins Thomas McCarthy's insightful Introduction to this generous selection of four decades of Geard Smyth's poetry, in which his intimacy with his nativy city ("Smyth's synagogue", as McCarthy calls it) is balanced by a fascination with the wider imaginative world of Art and of "many journeys", both outward and interior. Gerard Smyth was born in 1951 in Dublin, where he still lives. His poetry has been published widely in literary journals in Ireland, Britain and the United States, as well as in translation, since the late 1960s. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Daytime Sleeper (2002), A New Tenancy (2004) and The Mirror Tent (2007), all from the Dedalus Press. He is a member of Aosdána.

The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems

Gerard Smyth, a poet strongly associated with his native Dublin, brings a fresh, outward-looking perspective to his poems in A Song of Elsewhere. While Dublin remains as a "hunting ground for life's necessities," the wider world of Paris, Lisbon, and the American Midwest reflect an increased appreciation of the role of the traveling poet and musician.

A Song of Elsewhere

The Sundays of Eternity

Memory and return, swansongs of a time "about to pass into history books", and the re-evaluation of what one poem calls The Sepia Years, Gerard Smyth's tenth collection plays a kind of 'catch and throw' with the past. In poems that respond to echoes, memories and images of a recent but fading world, the poet finds the concerns and imperatives of that time still very much relevant to our own. In the world of literature and the arts, he recognises the necessity of loss and letting go, recalling the 'exuberant' blaze that 'consumed / the whole songbook of my youth', while elsewhere he admires a famous actor's 'many guises of metamorphosis'. Fundamental to Smyth's enterprise is his faith and trust in language, in poetry but also in prayer, and in the silence that suggests 'the shades of difference / between one word and the next'.

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