A Look in the Mirror and Other Poems

Description

'There are poets who make sense in their poems,' writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to this book. 'And then there are poets who also make sense of the literature they belong to, and continue to shed light on it whenever their work is read. Padraic Fallon belongs to this second category. His poems continue to illuminate us.' Fallon published little in his lifetime but is now recognised as a major poet. He inherited a tradition of Irish culture redefined by Yeats, and contributed to it poems that combine lyricism with ironic clear-sightedness. Responding to the landscapes and history of Ireland, Fallon looks outwards, too, to European literature and the complexities of the modern world. 'Padraic Fallon comes to us now as much a contemporary as he was when he began,' Seamus Heaney declares.

PADRAIC FALLON was born in Athenry, Co. Galway in 1905. He moved to Dublin while he was in his teens, and his first poems were published there by 'AE' (George Russell). He married in 1930, and had six sons, of whom four survive. His middle years were spent in Wexford, and it was there that he wrote a series of radio plays. He moved back to Dublin in 1963, and then to Cornwall in 1967, before returning to Ireland. His last years were spent in Kinsale, Co. Cork. Padraic Fallon died in 1974. His Collected Poems were published by Dolmen Press a few months before his death. In 1990 Carcanet published a new Collected Poems adding previously unpublished work.

Gratitude is the inevitable response to windfalls and legacies, and to encounter this corpus of work from a fully realized voice is a rare and memorable experience. Seamus Heaney"