About Gerard Reidy
Ger Reidy was born near Westport, Co. Mayo. He has won several national poetry competitions including the Allingham, the Maria Edgeworth, the Boyle Arts Festival prize on two occasions and has been the recipient of a number of bursaries and residencies sponsored by the Arts Council and Mayo County Council. His first collection, Pictures From A Reservation, was published by Dedalus Press.
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He has been published in many literary journals, both at home and abroad, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times and Cyphers, and has read at numerous literary festivals, including the Cúirt Festival in Galway in 2010 and 2016, where his second collection, Drifting Under The Moon, and his collection of short stories, Jobs for a Wet Day was launched. In 2024 his fourth collection of poetry Clay was published by Arlen House.
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He has been translated into Russian and recently into Turkish.
His poem The Vortex was recently unveiled on the Galway poetry trail.
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Ger has been actively involved in promoting the endeavours of the artistic community in Co. Mayo over the years. He has been actively involved in the Westport Arts Festival, chairman of the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, director of the Westport Festival of Chamber Music and director of the Customs House Arts Studio in Westport.
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Ger is a retired civil engineer, has three children and four grandchildren and lives near Westport, Co. Mayo.
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Ger is also an organic farmer and is keening interested in biodiversity and has planted twelve acres of oak trees.
Reviewers have commented as follows on Pictures from a Reservation:
“There is a quietness, a poetic reserve, at the heart of this book (…) that draws you slowly but assuredly into a world of poetic gentle asides…The images are fresh and the emotions uncompromisingly honest. Buy the book. It’s a wise move”.
Dermot Healy, Cyphers
“Ger Reidy’s poetry is inspired by the untamed landscape of Mayo, his lyrics are peppered with hard-hitting musings on the perennial problems that have bedeviled life on the fringe”.
The Irish Times
“Ger Reidy’s use of language has a quiet, unassuming simplicity which belies the power of his imagery and the eloquence of his words”.
Arts West magazine
“Reidy’s poems are powerful and careful constructs buried deep for the most part in the landscape and determinations of the West of Ireland… This is the West writ raw without the tourist trappings.”
Fred Johnston, Books Ireland
Reviewers on Drifting under the Moon:
“His work is not far removed from the Mayo gothic of Paul Durcan and Mike McCormick but Reidy is more attuned to the artifices of his work, and there are wry asides on the quiet life the poems observe… (His poems) ponder well the unregarded nature of his own material, nodding to Seamus Heaney’s “The Tollund Man”, when Reidy describes a bog body “waiting in vain to be discovered, freeze- framed into inarticulate verb”.
John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
“Ger Reidy’s poems fizzle like fireworks on a November evening. Reidy makes much out of his Mayo locales, but not for geographic reasons of identity or belonging, but more as building blocks for direct lyrical statements which often leave the reader astounded at how much philosophic weight Reidy can give a short 15-20 line poem. There are no meta-poetic tricks here. There are straightforward lyric poems which yield their meanings without undue effort. To quote this or that excerpt from Reidy is to do him a disservice. This volume deserves to be read in its entirety with the same intense concentration which has gone into the poems’ making. Reidy avoids any pastoralism and his Kavanagh-like realism and eye for the particular neither celebrates nor condemns his own parish. As he writes in “The Settlement”: “out here, like everywhere/I have learned that this is all there is.” This reminds you of Philip Larkins’ famous line “Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence” (from the “The Importance of Elsewhere”) and Reidy’s poems echo the grounded concision of Larkin albeit with his customary gloom. Perhaps a happier comparison would be R. S. Thomas whose poems attain an astonishing lyrical amplitude out of the slightest of rural subject matters, as Reidy’s do here."
Benjamin Keatinge, Poetry Ireland Review
Ger Reidy's collection, Before Rain (Arlen House), was shortlisted for the Pigott Prize at Listowel Writers Week and his collection of short stories, Jobs for a Wet Day (Arlen House), was nominated for the Edge Hill prize- the best collection of short stories in the British Isles.
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Clay, his latest collection has just been launched at the Strokestown Poetry Festival.