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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THE OLDCASTLE DANCE
for Shay Keogh
In 1971 at the Oldcastle dance
it was Bubblegum and slow set ballads –
we held our breaths
and waited for the secret signs
when the DJ put on The Jackson Five.
There was a glitterball for glitz,
its hundred mirrors showing
the new beginners learning the rituals
of the dance pavilion.
The girls of summer still had names
chosen from the list of saints –
they were lissom, sinuous
and in their night disguises they looked unlike
the truer versions of themselves –
dreamers staring into the distance,
convent girls in modest dress.
The air was thick with their perfumes.
In another age they might have been
the temptress in the opera,
Botticelli’s muse
or the Queen of Sheba
when she stood before Solomon.
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