Reviews of Pictures from a Reservation:

 

Gerard Reidy’s collection is the fruit of an engagement with his native Mayo, where he lives and works. It is an engagement which is loving but unsentimental, the engagement of a resident rather than of an emigrant or a tourist. Reidy can, of course be as nostalgic as the rest of us, but it is a nostalgia with its feet on the ground. In ‘November Day’, which is a series of beautifully realised cameos- a bachelor neighbour “laden with his mothers instructions”- the images coalesce into a picture of his father being paid for cattle after a fair “ with Davitt’s ghost smiling everywhere. The idea of the Mayo –born land leaguer smiling at his people coming into their own gives wonderful resonance and rootedness to the poem .....Reidy at his best can write like this

Smoked like a Moroccan street trader

He offers me a load of breast turf,

As if boatloads of grain wouldn’t leave the quay,

As if magpies wouldn’t pick our eyes out,

As if grass wouldn’t melt in our mouths.

Paddy Bushe- Poetry Ireland Review

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“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

 

Reidy’s poetry is unique in that it views with a clear ,loving and sceptical eye the rural landscape of the west of Ireland, positioned as he is among the dank and dismal hungers of the land and spirit and the fierce urge towards modernity now informing the country. His language is fiercely uncompromising uniting the immediacies of country speech with the awareness of literary subtleties. His approach is daring and true, his success is palpable.

John F Deane

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“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

 

 

Reviews of 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

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Ger Reidy’s first collection of poems appeared in 1998, and received widespread praise for its compelling voice and authentic evocation of the west of Ireland. Just over a decade later Drifting under the Moon will considerably advance his reputation, the new poems revealing an increased awareness of craft, a broadening and deepening of his vision.

Pat Boran

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Reidy has grown as a poet between the two collections and reveals a greater grasp of his craft and a more mature vision in the poems of his second collection. They are full of references to the county and his neighbours past and present but he is also aware of the wider world. He takes in the war in Afghanistan for example in one poem. However in that long Irish tradition he is chiefly a poet of his place and every poem echoes with local speech and local gossip. Like Patrick Kavanagh, Reidy finds drama in the lives of people around him. There can be humour in his poems as in Lame Dogs but it is often tinged in sadness at wasted lives and lost opportunities.

Books Ireland

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Review of Before Rain (Shortlisted for the Piggott prize)

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His writing stands very close to that veil that separates us from self knowledge and from other times and dimensions.  To quote himself, ‘like gazing through an ancient gate’.. Ger’s work stands between spaces like the World Tree with its branches and its roots of equal expanse and scale.  That tree of his artistic life springs from what might be called the Poetic Soul, — people don’t talk about the should much now since the kind of religious version went out of fashion.  To Me the soul is not that blackened organ trapped within a sinful body, the soul is, rather, the hole in our existence, the opening that provides access to the inexplicable, to the Universe without and the Universe within.  And the Poet stands four square right in front of that opening, acting as conduit for that connection between Us and Our Understanding of ourselves.  While we all use language to communicate our need and wants and our opinions, we make noise with language;  The Poet uses language to LISTEN; to listen to the falling leaf, the feeble sun, the widow pausing, the stillborn lamb, the old man staring, the rusty gate.  

But Ger’s listening language is not of the sentimental nor the ornamental kind; no — it is accurate in its meaty precision - in its hard stare at the terrible face of Nature - the windy gaps, the endless drudgery, the battle for survival on a small farm, while at the same time heartbreaking in its ARDENT longing to fall INTO nature.  He speaks of falling in a poem called ‘The Inversion’. falling through time, like falling through that hole in our perception - and then coming back up like a pearl diver in space — back to where he started in the centre of his ‘overgrown lane…like a schoolboy dawdling home’.

 

There is so much in this book.  The images he uses are ones with which we all think we are familiar — yet his use of language makes them spring new, freshly formed and fully armed from the pen of the creator…..just as the goddess Athena sprung warlike from the head of her father Zeus, fully armed and with a mighty shout.  That same goddess of war always took pity on those she vanquished, and even as she blinded a warrior, would grant him the consolation of Inner Sight.  And Inner Sight often hovers as a theme in this book.  Many worlds seem capable of existing simultaneously.  In ‘One day in the meadow’ we see a procession of the dead pass effortlessly through a crowd of haymakers in summer.  The labourers do not see them through the sweat and effort of their work, but the very young boy and the very old man see them,  because THEY are close to the veil that separates.  In his work, Ger often places himself on the cusp or the margin of things, in the borderlands;  looking out and looking in simultaneously.  ‘Winter Garden’ is a poem which encapsulates this Janus like position when a small boy plays carelessly in the walled and manicured garden while outside a puny sun illuminates the meat factory and the briars unfurl their tendrils in preparation for their invasion of paradise.This double position also holds sway in his simple poem ‘My Village’ when he writes so poignantly….

 

‘it robbed from me its gift of nothing

My village gave me everything’.

 

This ability to see both ways, to have eyes in the back of his head, is the gift (and Curse) of the poet.  Ger Reidy has it in spades, not just in his writing but in everything about him, his generosity, his support of colleagues and artists of all disciplines.  

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Ger Reidy is one of the brave band who endure and continue to make work.  I am one of the few admirers who does not foreground the ‘quietness or reserve’ of his work but rather his righteous anger, his tenacious spirit, that holds true to the grassy path and doesn’t give up when the bulldozer comes in sight. 

 He is a poet of our times and a man for our times.

Alice Maher

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Review of Clay

 

The title of Ger Reidy’s new collection, Clay, signals a clear affinity with Kavanagh’s world of small farmers, with a side glance towards Joyce’s Dubliners. Himself a farmer who has also had a long career as an engineer with Mayo Co Council, Reidy writes about his locality and society as an insider, but with a cultivated repertoire of wider reference. In ‘Once upin a Time in the West’, he is present as a group of men wrestle a bullock to the ground to dehorn and castrate it. The telling detail is where one man ‘straightened his back as the blood/sprayed a Pollack design over his dirty vest.’ Characteristically, there’s a sense throughout of a post war era being superseded by modern technology and the displaced perspectives of travel. This movement in time is beautifully captured in ‘Wartime Couple a vignette of his parents taking their family to the beach to practice a kind of contemporary chic, swimming and sunbathing, though, he says,

I know somehow that my father wanted 

to be at home in the hay field,

my mother cooking or saying prayers

 

The livestock farmers he describes in At Ballinrobe Mart, increasingly shadowed by the schemes of forestry men’ Drag rams and cows into battered trailers‘. Reidy declares in the closing line,’ Count me among their ranks for I know who they are’.

This repeated identification with his locale tends to keep the poet grounded, both literally and figuratively. He can share the feeling of vigorous renewal in spring and can’ Whistle a tune of praise/ in gratitude for everybody and everything’, even though this impulse is qualified as ‘ Remission’ in the poem’s title. The same seasonal relief is celebrated in ‘ Midsummer’, where the poet’s habitual reserve gives way to the ritual of fires at the solstice, abandoning all native suspicions towards the elation of the moment

All we can do is gaze away as the tired heart

begins to sing through cloudy eyes.

Set adrift with good reason to celebrate,

Our measured language learnt to shield us

against false joy, useless now.  

Reidy’s temperament has been disciplined by a western farmer’s experience of hard weather and meagre gain, hammering closed my shivering heart’( February). There are no consolations on offer here from what you might call heritage, nothing folksy to sweeten the rural experience: several poems reach back into history to look native cruelty straight in the eye, with the spectre of emigration hovering in the background. And it is perhaps emigration that creates a sense of insecurity characteristic to these poems, where at any moment the whole scene can be undermined by departure, like the figure in ‘The Departure’, who decides finally to let go:

He got up after a long silence among friends,

then walked across fields towards the hills,

senses flung open , never seen again.

Sean Lysaght- Poetry Ireland Review

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Review of Jobs For A Wet Day

 

This is the real thing. A powerful, chiselled collection of short stories which are by turns funny and bleak and compassionate. The truth rings out on every page.

Mike McCormack

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These stories describe characters who live on the edge of society. A wonderful description of rural existance, its drudgery, sadnesses and thankless routine.

Sue Leonard, The Sunday Independent

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Ger Reidy writes with an insider's knowledge of nature - his careful observations of landscape and flora and fauna bring the fields and salty air of Connacht alive, along with its football games, marts, and the sound of cattle being called home. Yet Reidy's world is a human, and humane, one too - characters come and go across his pages, participants in a gala dance, immigrants, individuals with history on their backs.

All in all Clay is a triumph, a book 'allowing the senses to feed /into the unlimited joy of awareness'.

James Harpur