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VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces brings together ten years of work from Irish poet, critic and art practitioner Fergal Gaynor. This is poetry in the modernist tradition, often in experimental forms. The Stepping Poems make apparent a surrounding silence or inarticulacy; the terse, gnomic triads of the Runes are based on Old Irish riddling forms. Through these forms recurring themes are refracted: location, especially Gaynor’s native Cork City and Munster region; the presence of history, often as fossilized remains, in XI Pieces for Austria-Hungary; and the contemporary, as something alien and urgent, the subject of science fiction. VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces is at once learned and passionate, impersonal and highly individual.
. . . But there is that second strand, the fitful, halting strand of Irish modernism, a bare technique, picked up by Beckett and carried through by writers such the vastly underestimated Aidan Higgins, the minimalist poet, Trevor Joyce, or the young neo-Classicist poet, Fergal Gaynor. Joyce would have recognised these contemporary writers instantly, knowing that their modernist efforts to escape from the story-teller material of Ireland should lead to new forms of narrative; the digital poem or the pen as camera.
(Thomas McCarthy in the The Examiner)
Fergal Gaynor was born in Cork City in 1969, of Tipperary parents (a lecturer in Ancient Classics and a National School teacher). Educated in Cork, Sheffield, and Swansea, he was awarded a doctorate in 2002 for a thesis on D.H. Lawrence, Cézanne and modernism. Since 2000, when he co-founded the art interventionist group Art / not art, he has been continually involved in the arts, especially in his native city: regularly performing and collaborating, curating (e.g. the Cork Caucus in 2005), assisting with the SoundEye Festival, devising (e.g. The Avant: Ten Days of the Progressive Arts), editing (ER : Enclave Review) and writing criticism (chiefly for Circa Contemporary Art Magazine). He is married to the baroque violinist Marja Gaynor (née Tuhkanen) with whom he has a daughter, Eleanor. |
