Mayo poets launching new collections in Westport

TWO renowned Mayo poets, Geraldine Mitchell and Ger Reidy, are launching new collections of poetry this Sunday in Westport. The joint launch, which takes place in Matt Molloy’s, Bridge Street, at 4pm, will be officially performed by internationally acclaimed artist Alice Maher, while music will be provided by Diarmaid Moynihan, widely acknowledged as one of the country’s leading uilleann pipers.
Geraldine Mitchell’s new collection, ‘Naming Love’, is her fifth. “The title comes from a line in a poem I wrote on the day of the poet Eavan Boland’s funeral,” the poet tells The Mayo News.
“It was May 1, 2020. No chance of attending, of course, we were all in lockdown. In the two-part poem I refer to how, during the dark Covid times, we ‘lost/ the shame of welling up in public places, / of naming love, and naming it again, / clapping it out in nightly rhythms / among strangers…’.”
In previous work, Mitchell has explored themes such as loss and survival; people and place; nature and climate change. Now she sees another thread connecting her poems.
“As I was putting the collection together I realised that, although I have no ‘love poems’ as such in the traditional sense, all my poems can be read as love poems: love for nature, love for all living creatures (from birds to beetles to refugees adrift in the Mediterranean), love of life itself. The wonderful artist Marc Chagall once said ‘For me, love is the true colour, the true matter of art’. When you think about it, he was right. The act of creating art, of writing a poem, is an act of love.”
The poet grew to realise that love is a many-faceted thing, a shape-shifting form, the intensity of which can morph and motivate.
“I came to see that, far from being a soft, feel-good emotion, love can be militant, an active force for urgent change in the frighteningly aggressive world we inhabit. If you consider the cover image of ‘Naming Love’, a print by my artist daughter, Lisa Molina (who also designed the covers of two of my earlier collections), you will notice a distinct absence of hearts or red roses… A fist is raised in resistance and the sun, not a romantic moon, is blazing forth.”
Mitchell seeks to reclaim love’s defiant, resilient, actively protective nature.
“We have allowed certain emotions or qualities, such as hope, compassion and empathy, to be classified as ‘soft’, feminine, passive. Love is often labelled this way too, while the feelings that dominate our world are the aggressive, masculine and, ultimately, violent ones. My poems try, always in an indirect way, to rescue love from its commercial straightjacket and give it a resilient, defiant and non-submissive role.

O bonsai heart
loosen your love knot
let the snipped twigs
grow

Born in Dublin, Mitchell lived for many years in France and Spain working as a teacher and journalist. She has been living in Killadoon on the West Mayo coast since for almost 25 years. Her poetry writing took off when she moved west in 2000 with her late husband and, in 2008, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for her first collection ‘World Without Maps’ (2011). Her subsequent collections, ‘Of Birds and Bones’ (2014), ‘Mountains for Breakfast’ (2017) and ‘Mute/Unmute’ (2020) have further cemented her reputation as – in the words of fellow scribe Elaine Feeney – ‘a deeply perceptive poet with a keen sense of the natural world’.
Meanwhile, Ger Reidy’s latest collection of poetry, ‘Clay’, continues to celebrate the territory he knows best – life in rural Mayo and the existential challenges encountered living there over the decades.
Like Mitchell’s refusal to reduce love to a swoon, Reidy resists hackneyed depictions of country living as bucolic bliss or romantic idyll. He explores themes of emigration, rural isolation and ‘the tyrants love, life and time, as Kavanagh referred to them’.
His work is intensely coloured by his life in Mayo and in Aughagower, outside Westport, where he grew up and still lives, having retired as a civil engineer. But there are shades of more exotic hues too – journeys to Kazakhstan, Armenia and Mexico; giants of the arts like Tchaikovsky, Tarkovsky and Turner; as well as classical music, jazz and the blues. Reidy recognises that the world over, universal themes play out repeatedly on local stages, in individuals’ and communities’ preoccupations, struggles and triumphs.
In this way, poems with political themes flow seamlessly into the collection. Poems like ‘Stillborn Republic’, in which Reidy laments the establishment of a true republic as Connolly called for, as opposed to the theocracy that controlled the State up until recently. The contemporary challenges of world instability, right-wing populism and the climate emergency also feature.
‘Clay’ is Reidy’s fourth collection, following on from ‘Pictures from a Reservation’ (1998), ‘Drifting Under the Moon’ (2010) and ‘Before Rain’ (2015), which was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize at Listowel Writers Week. Reidy’s debut collection of short stories ‘Jobs for a Wet Day’ (2016) was nominated for the Edge Hill Prize.
As in his previous collections, the fast-paced, ever-changing dance of the west’s weather and light continues to enthral Reidy. And throughout, his work is buoyed by a deep sense of gratitude for life in rural Mayo, an emphatic embrace of its unapologetic authenticity.

All are welcome to the joint launch of ‘Clay’ and ‘Naming Love’ in Matt Molloy’s, Westport, at 4pm this Sunday, April 28.