Poet and publisher Michael Smith dies

The poet Michael Smith has died in Dublin at the age of 72. As well as his own poetry, most of which is located in the working class Dublin of his childhood and youth, his work as a translator of Spanish and Latin American poetry won wide acclaim and earned him the European Academy Medal for distinguished work in translation in 2001.

For many years he taught English, Latin and Spanish at St Paul's College in Raheny. He co-founded the influential small publishing house New Writers' Press in 1967, out of which came a series of publications under the Zozimus imprint, as well as the journal the Lace Curtain.

Part of his agenda as a publisher was to revive the work and reputations of a number of Irish poets of the 1930s, including Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy and Denis Devlin.

His championing of that forgotten group of Irish modernist writers led to a renewed interest in their work among a new generation of readers and critics.

His first major collection, Times and Locations, was published by Dolmen Press in 1972. His Collected Poems was published by Shearsman Books in England in 2009 and his most recent book, Prayers for the Dead, appeared earlier this year.

He spent many summers in Spain, and published numerous translations of that country’s major poets including Lorca, Machado, Hernandez, Gongora, as well as of Vallejo and Neruda.

One of his former students in St Paul's, the writer and academic Prof Declan Kiberd, described him as "an audacious Latin teacher who treated every text as written from felt experience and not just as a basis for learning language".