‘A joy to read and reread’

Popular local man Gerry Coffey has compiled a collection of poetry that he will launch at Nenagh Library this Saturday.

A familiar face around the town since moving to Nenagh in 1992, Gerry is known to many for his years working as greenkeeper at the golf club. He is also known for his involvement in a great many community enterprises, including Nenagh Allotments and the Community Wellness Garden. He has been an activist for various causes, especially focussed on the rights and needs of his fellow citizens. Among other endeavours, Gerry established a local citizens forum; the Nenagh Urban Social Farm, and Nenagh Risings, a commemorative initiative that marked the era of revolution and evolution for Ireland in the 1910s.

Growing up in Dun Laoghaire and Clontarf, Gerry’s imagination was fired from an early age. And while he never envisaged that he would write a book of poems, the collection he has now produced has met with glowing praise from award-winning local author Donal Ryan, who penned an introduction to Gerry’s book.

“These poems are a joy to read and reread,” Donal writes of ‘Aspects of a Life’. “These are poems from the heart, and from the heartland of our fracturing republic, from the pen of a man engaged in a constant battle to lift his fellow humans, to celebrate, commemorate and protect, to illuminate justice, to make the world fairer and safer for everyone.”

The poems reflect Gerry’s varied experiences, from growing up in Clondalkin, to the music culture that inspired his generation, to family tribulations and tragedies, to projects for the betterment of people. Included is his reply to President Michael D Higgins on the occasion of the official opening of Nenagh Community Wellness Garden in 2012.

Gerry says he was encouraged by friends to publish this collection after they saw some of his writings last year.

INSPIRED BY LIFE

“There were items that had been floating around in my head and they needed to be got down on paper,” Gerry writes in his introduction to the book.

“The only thing I know to write about is my life and my lived experience, nothing else. Everything else does not matter because it’s not my life, but because other people’s lives touch mine and my life touches theirs, we exist in that circle of life.

“I have been lucky to meet and know to date so many amazing, wonderful people who, despite everything fate has thrown at them, have tried to be best human beings that they can be. That is why I write, that is why I do the things I do.”

For Donal Ryan, Gerry’s “thoughtful, clear-eyed generosity permeates his poetry”.

“From the portrait of dislocation, adjustment and hard-won self-image he creates in ‘Aspects of a Life’, to the aching, Heaney-esque lament, ‘Requiem for a Lost Boy’, Gerry applies his passion and his linguistic verve to creating intense, compressed narratives that open themselves up in our imaginations into vistas of experience.

“Whole lives are lived in these verses, the arrhythmic pulse of existence beats through each line. There’s a resounding and wonderfully pleasing echo of Dublin slam poetry to ‘Poem for Andy’, Gerry’s paean and tribute to his friend Andy Loughran, and the shockingly terminal ending to ‘Judge Not’ is a beat-stopper, a sudden silence, a heartbreaker. In the poems ‘Lost and Listening Ear’, Gerry turns again to his exhortations to all of us to take care of ourselves and each other, reminding of the infinite empathy of listening, of openness to helping and being helped.”

Donal concludes by encouraging the reader to “hear these works read live by the man himself”. You can do just that at Nenagh Library this Saturday, November 25, between 2.30pm and 4pm. The book will be on sale there, and from The Nenagh Bookshop, Eason, JKC’s and online from www.scotuspress.com.