THE GRAIN STORE AT BALLYMALOE

Join us for a wonderful night of poetry and harp

Thomas McCarthy. Born and raised at Cappoquin Co. Waterford in 1954. He studied at UCC under the influence of Sean Lucy and John Montague; Sean Dunne and Theo Dorgan were fellow students. McCarthy has published a substantial body of poems as well as a collection of autobiographical essays and two novels. He lives in Cork. He received the Patrick Kavangh Award in 1977 for his first book and the American-Irish Foundation's Literary Award in 1984. His more recent books include his selected poems, Mr Dineen's Careful Parade, and Merchant Prince, a combination of poems and a novella recounting the story of a Cork merchant.

In 2009, Anvil Press published McCarthy's The Last Geraldine Officer. Set in two parts, his latest work begins with a collection of short lyrics of public and private life, with poems of family, love and politics and of Irish history. Part Two is a recreation of the forgotten period in the Anglo-Irish political world between the two World Wars, drawing on a wide variety of poetic texts to mix competing loyalties and readings of Irish history.

Forthcoming in 2010 is his historical work on the burning of Cork's Carnegie Library & the rebuilding of its collections, Rising from the Ashes.

"Considered by Dennis O'Driscoll to be, along with Muldoon, the most important Irish poet of his generation, McCarthy is a poet primarily concerned with politics and family. His work's importance lies in its unremitting and detailed examination of the Republic's failures and successes as an independent state. Described by Eavan Boland as the first poet born into the Republic to write about it critically, McCarthy has done so from the perspective of a family dedicated and loyal to the state's most successful and powerful political party: Fianna Fail. But his poems are not eulogies to the party or apologies for its policies; they are more like an exploration of the party as an object of loyalty and devotion (like a lover objectified) with all the potential such an object has for empowerment and betrayal. McCarthy has attracted much lazy and inattentive criticism including one reviewer who presumed he was writing about the Soviet Communist Party." -Patrick Cotter

Gerard Smyth was born in Dublin in 1951 and began publishing poetry in the late 1960s when his first poems were published by David Marcus in the New Irish Writing Page of The Irish Press and by James Simmons in The Honest Ulsterman.
New Writers’ Press published a limited edition small collection, The Flags Are Quiet, in 1969 and another limited, hand-printed edition, Twenty Poems in 1971, followed by Orchestra of Silence, a Tara Telephone publication, also in 1971. This early work – highly influenced by his reading of Dylan Thomas and Hopkins - also appeared in the Press’s journal The Lace Curtain.

Smyth was born and grew up in the old Liberties area of the city which has influenced, and features in, much of the poetry he has written. It is the factor in his work which prompted the poet Michael Hartnett to say “Gerard Smyth is essentially a city-poet; lyrical, passionate…he may do for Dublin in verse what Joyce did for it in prose”.

Another significant, but contrasting, landscape which frequently appears in his poems is the rural area of County Meath where he spent the summers of his childhood and teen years on the small farm on which his mother was born – and where he wrote his first poems at the age of sixteen. He has, up to the present time, maintained close contact with this ancestral ground of his maternal family’s past.

Smyth has worked all his professional life as a journalist with The Irish Times where he is now Managing Editor with responsibility for arts coverage. He was the newspaper’s poetry critic for several years in the late 1970s.

He was elected a member of Aosdana in May 2009.

A poet of the mundane and the mysterious, a poet of the everyday and also of the eternal. – Dennis O’Driscoll

Smyth is a fine lyric poet…close to home in image and event. – Augustus Young, The Niagra Magazine (New York)

Jane Hayter-Hames is a writer and historian. She has published a local history of her native parish in Devon; a biography of Cynthia Longfield, dragonfly expert; and Arthur O’Connor, United Irishman, a biography of one of the most controversial leaders of the Irish rebellion of 1798. Her book of poetry Rough Seas was published in 2001. She has been a published poet and a pub poet, but she aims to be a practical poet. ‘Poetry should be useful’ she says, ‘when people are miserable or confused, happy or sad, perplexed by current events – poetry should give them a line or two to hang onto.’
Her life on a Dartmoor farm underlies her outlook. She ran a conference on European-Islamic dialogue in London and an Early Music festival in County Cork. She recently went back to university to study history. She draws on these varied experiences and many others in her poetry. She lives in Devon and Co. Cork.

Throughout the evening harpist, Roisin Donohoe, will perform a selection of harp pieces