There is a quietness, a poetic reserve, at the heart of this book that draws you slowly but assuredly into a world of poetic gentle asides … The images are fresh and the emotions uncompromisingly honest. Buy the book. It’s a wise move.
– Dermot Healy, Cyphers
… poems which fizzle like fireworks on a November evening. Reidy makes much out of his Mayo locales, but not for geographic reasons of identity or belonging, but more as building blocks for direct lyrical statements which often leave the reader astounded at how much philosophic weight Reidy can give a short 15–20 line poem. There are no meta-poetic tricks here. There are straightforward lyric poems which yield their meanings without undue effort. To quote this or that excerpt from Reidy is to do him a disservice. This volume deserves to be read in its entirety with the same intense concentration which has gone into the poems’ making. Reidy avoids any pastoralism and his Kavanagh-like realism and eye for the particular neither celebrates nor condemns his own parish.
– Benjamin Keatinge, Poetry Ireland Review
His work is not far removed from the Mayo gothic of Paul Durcan and Mike McCormick but Reidy is more attuned to the artifices of his work, and there are wry asides on the quiet life the poems observe … [His poems] ponder well the unregarded nature of his own material, nodding to Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Tollund Man’, when Reidy describes a bog body ‘waiting in vain to be discovered, freeze- /framed into inarticulate verb’.
– John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
Ger Reidy’s use of language has a quiet, unassuming simplicity which belies the power of his imagery and the eloquence of his words.
– Arts West Magazine
Reidy’s poems are powerful and careful constructs buried deep for the most part in the landscape and determinations of the West of Ireland … This is the West writ raw without the tourist trappings.
– Fred Johnston, Books Ireland
Ger Reidy was born near Westport, Co. Mayo. He has won several national poetry competitions and has been the recipient of a number of bursaries and residencies from the Arts Council and Mayo County Council. His debut collection, Pictures from a Reservation, was published by Dedalus Press in 1998. His second collection, Drifting Under the Moon, was published by Dedalus in 2010. His poetry has been published in many literary journals, both at home and abroad, and he has read at numerous literary festivals. Since 2012 Ger has judged the Westport Arts Festival poetry competition. His debut short fiction collection, Jobs for a Wet Day, is published by Arlen House.