THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
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GAELTACHT
One word and tomorrow became amarach.
One glance and they saw
that the fattening grassland was fair exchange
for the vowels of Connacht.
With luggage and a language from the west,
that was native in their bones,
they came with seed to sow
and grow into the artistry of their hands.
Some brought baby carriages,
rooms of drapery and family furniture,
some brought love and marriage
but few possessions just the essentials
to make a respectable house:
cups for the table, a kettle for the stove,
a tune for the fiddle, a ballad of chivalry,
a dance that was a window-rattling jig.
From the night of the census
there will be evidence of lives once lived
in those life-changing days
when newcomers made a journey in reverse
centuries after the exodus
of their ancestors to the west.
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