Article in The Mayo News

 

Ger Reidy's fourth collection of poetry continues to celebrate the territory he knows best- life in rural Mayo and the existential challenges encountered living there over the decades. The poems in this collection do not subscribe to some kind of romantic vision conjured up to satisfy the perceived image of living in a pastoral nirvana. Emigration, rural isolation and the tyrants love, life and time as Kavanagh referred to them feature prominently, indeed Reidys upbringing on a small farm and still living there having retired as a civil engineer suggest that he knows this territory well. There are influences, his travels to Kazakhstan , Armenia and Mexico, and other influences associated with Tchaikovsky, Tarkovsky, and Turner to name a few, but these are woven into the landscape as Reidy seems to blend their themes into his own with an ease suggesting that to know the local is to know the universal.

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Music is a constant in Reidy's poems whether it be blues, jazz or Chopin. His early discovery of classical music seems to have influenced and diverted him into another world, one in which he is gladly immersed, one which tempered the brutality of the real world as a young man.

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There is a political edge to this collection too with poems like Stillborn Republic where Reidy laments the establishment of a true republic as Connolly called for as opposed to the theocracy which controlled us up until recently. The trauma inflicted by Covid is revisited and the cosy assumptions we had for decades, concerning world stability is addressed too in the context of climate crisis and right wing populism.

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The dance of weather and light continue to enthral Reidy. He sees the sky as a rotating canvass. Painters from Paul Henry to Keating have been captured by that same sky. Reidy celebrates this dynamic sky and is overwhelmed with gratitude for the life he lives, his family, friends and the rugged realism he joyfully encounters on a daily basis.