Bloomsday launch for Gerald and John’s new creative collaboration

Gerald Dawe introduces Revenant, a limited edition of his poems with images by John Behan, being launched in Kennys’ next week.

Some writers yearn to be artists, by which I mean visual artists. I know I have. There is something more achieved and independent about a painting, or sculpture. So the next best thing is to collaborate with artists and get close to how they see things, how they work. Over the years I have been lucky on that score to work with two Galway-based artists – John Behan and Pádraic Reaney.

Going back to 1980 John produced a stunning image to partner a poem I had written in aid of the Galway Simon Community and some years later in 1988, we collaborated again on a poster poem to help raise funds for the Nora Barnacle House in the City’s Bowling Green. It was published to coincide with that year’s Bloomsday and what an event it was!  Stephen Joyce holding court in the tiny front room just across the road from the historic St Nicholas Church, where – story has it – Joyce dallied, wondering whether he would be welcome in Nora’s uncle’s house.

Personal lives are always complicatedly entwined in making of art!

I recorded the poem Memo to J.J. for RTÉ TV News, a terrifyingly prolonged moment in front of camera, were it not for the wonderful film shot in Galway to underpin the poem’s journey.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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