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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LEDWIDGE IN LOVE AND WAR
A small house, unadorned –
a country road and farther on
high walls around the local aristocracy.
You remained polite but in broad Meath vowels
could put on rage when it was needed
for loudmouth politics or when you heard of poets
shot at dawn for noble failure.
At the end of a day in the copper mines,
or working the long miles on roads of dust,
you joined the blackbird in the orchard,
Keats and Shelley in the library
of a castle lord. The bohemian look
that you put on and tied with a velvet knot
did not impress that girl you loved
and for whom you wrote your threnodies.
Where Aegean shores sparkled
and in the muddy ranks
you spent your time remembering that Sunday spin,
peddling through bog hush and riverside chill
where the Boyne was strong and fast at Swynnerton.
A friend who said he saw your ghost
slip by in midnight rain did not know then
that you were safe in your soldier’s grave
in Passchendaele.
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