Gerard Smyth
Articles by Gerard Smyth
2021
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Mission Accomplished
The thinking behind Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s working practice
2020
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Irish Literature
The Procrustean Bed
Since her remarkable debut, ‘The Heel of Bernadette’, Colette Bryce has shown both variation and range in her work, developing a distinctive poetic personality that…
2019
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Irish Literature
In Tune
Many of Moya Cannon’s poems relate to music and song. But more than that, when these, as they so often do, become the subject, the…
2018
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Irish Literature
High Jinks and Down to Earth
A poetry collection by broadcaster John Kelly is flush with acute observation and understanding, as well as sparkling felicities of imaginative detail and linguistic invention.…
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World Literature
Gazing Heavenwards
The challenge in our secular age for a poet engaging with the spiritual and religious is how to sound the authentic note. To this end…
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Irish Literature
Cut and Catch
While Tom French moves much further afield in several of the poems in his new collection, enlarging his range and what might be called his…
2017
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Irish Literature
The Call of the Fields
Francis Ledwidge was a poet who went to war, but he did not become a war poet in the normal sense. Mostly he adhered to…
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Irish Literature
When All Our Gold Was Gorse
Thomas McCarthy, as poet and thinker, is a defender of the past against the more crass aspects of modernity. He speaks from a wise understanding…
2016
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Irish Literature
Watching the Moods
Coming just a few years after his ‘Collected Poems’, Macdara Woods’s new collection demonstrates the progression towards a lifelong unitary project; poem adds to poem,…
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Irish Literature
The City As Hero
If there is a ‘larger than life’ character in Lia Mills’s novel ‘Fallen' it is the city of Dublin itself, whose street names are evoked…
2015
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Irish Literature
Solitary Prowler
Dublin has been central to Thomas Kinsella’s imagination. No other writer since Joyce has so fervently mapped the city, and few writers have known it…
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World Literature
The Astonishment of Insight
A major new anthology of war poetry covers a range of conflicts including the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War,…
2014
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Irish Literature
When Not To Listen
Sinéad Morrissey has written of how she learned from the Welsh poet RS Thomas how to ignore, when necessary, a hostile environment and the play…
2012
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Between Worlds
Burnside’s poems inhabit places at the shifting and hazy intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, a zone where the dead “have more friends than…
Blog Posts by Gerard Smyth
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Reading the Mind of War
February 19, 2025