The Books: The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry: Peter Fallon

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

Next book on the shelf is The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon.

‘The Gallery Press has spent the last twenty-five years contributing towards bringing Irish poets and writers of plays and fiction to a wider world culture. I warmly salute the enormous contribution Peter Fallon has made to the diverse and challenging voices in Ireland.’ – Mary Robinson, President of Ireland, July 2, 1995, at the Abbey Theatre celebration honoring The Gallery Press’ 25th year of publishing. The Gallery Press was founded by Irish poet Peter Fallon

Richard Wilbur wrote of Peter Fallon’s poetry:

It does not filter the world of the small farm for some urban reader; rather it takes him there.

That expresses it perfectly. Peter Fallon grew up in County Meath, where he still lives today. He was raised on his uncle’s farm, and his poems are full of the rhythms of rural life, the realities of it, the harshness, the rare beauty. And yes, there is no “filter”. You must go where he goes. There are words I don’t understand. Farming words, colloquialisms … I love that about his work. It has a real voice. You can hear the brogue at times. It is conversational, as though the poems are stories being told around the peat fire some blustery night. Sometimes the poems feel like gossip, stories being passed on, stories about locals that everyone present knows. Yet Fallon’s poems are not insular. Not at all. They are vast. In the same way that John McGahern’s books are vast BECAUSE of their locality, their provincialism. (I’m with Thomas Hardy, who embraced provincialism, writing, “A certain provincialism is invaluable. It is of the essence of individuality.”)

But his poetry is just one of Peter Fallon’s extraordinary accomplishments. (He also edited the book I have been excerpting from.) When all is said and done and he has shuffled off this mortal coil, he will probably be remembered for founding The Gallery Press (at age eighteen, no less!!).

The Gallery Press building, North Meath

The Gallery Press just celebrated in 2010 forty years of publishing. It has come out with more than four hundred books and poems and plays, and is the top publishing house in Ireland. The Gallery Press has published plays of Brian Friel (excerpt from Translations here), as well as his stories. The Gallery Press has also published works by Derek Mahon (my post here), Medbh McGuckian (my post here), John Montague (my post here), Ciaran Carson (my post here), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (I’ll get to her eventually!), the wonderful John Banville (dude has a whole tag devoted to him), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael Hartnett (my post here), and many many more. Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Pearse Hutchinson, the list goes on and on. It is known for its bilingual editions, giving Irish-language poets a high-end venue to get their work read and seen. The Gallery Press is still going strong, running its operations out of a small old stone house in North Meath and it is a publishing house I have a great love for. Peter Fallon created it when he was a teenager. Like: how does one decide to just do that?

So there is Peter Fallon the publisher. The Gallery Press is a national institution by this time, and Ireland is right to be proud of it, and take up time on anniversaries to honor it.

But then there’s his poetry. He went to Trinity College, studying English, and began publishing poetry in the 1970s. He is still publishing. He lectures extensively, and speaks at writer’s conferences all over the world. One of his collections was so popular in Ireland that it was reprinted twice (almost unheard of!)

In 1993, he received the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute, and the award read:

Peter Fallon’s poetry has continued to flourish and deepen despite the extraordinary demands of his career as a publisher. The late poems of his most recent collection, Eye to Eye, are the finest he has written. When the history of Irish poetry in the late twentieth century comes to be written, the name of Peter Fallon is sure to turn up everywhere.

Poetry International wrote of Fallon:

His own work is often centered in Oldcastle, County Meath, where he lives; he is a perceptive observer of and participant in its rural activities, minding sheep, dipping, lambing, roofing, making hay, mowing, attending the mart, being part of the community. He has an eye for natural objects – the beauty of chestnut, oak, whitethorn, laurel, ash. Delighting in the landscape and its creatures, he also writes with understanding and compassion about the superstitions and misfortunes that affect a small community. No one else has borne witness with such fidelity and grace to the everyday life of this rural place and no one else reproduces its sayings and dry wit with such immediacy . . . Fallon’s poetry has a deceptive simplicity and accessibility even as it affirms the values of endurance, survival and communal life.

Seamus Heaney wrote of him:

Peter Fallon’s poetry confirms Keats’s notion that an intelligence becomes a soul through being schooled in a world of pains and troubles.

The poem I will post today is a wonderful piece of work called “The Meadow”. Watch how he immerses you in the act of cutting hay. The process of it, the fears of rain, the competition of it … and then, in the final stanza, his view opens up, to look across millennia. He references Newgrange, a place I have been to many times, and by looping that in, he connects to something almost mythic, as he says. The landscape alive with ghosts and ancient references.

I love his poetry, and I love The Gallery Press. I love that people like Peter Fallon exist, a man who lives his art. And has done so for decades now.

The Meadow

We have wedded the towbar
and turned the mower’s eighteen blades –
the mower, the meadow reiver.
We’ll work all night, by the last
and first light and, in between, by the minutes
of moonlight. This is hay fever.

For weeks we’ve watched smudged fields
weighed down by mean July.
We’ve heard them broadcast
brightness and woken to wet weather.
We’d be better off watching Billy McNamee
than paying heed to the radio forecast.

When meadows grow he finds a way.
We say we’ll trust our own translation
of the sky and start to mow
this evening. We’ll be racing the rain.
Tomorrow we’ll turn and turn again.
Midweek we’ll set the bob to row.

Then we’ll bale. We did that then,
headed the stacks with loose hay
from the headlands. We thought we’d won
until we heard of loss that rotted in rows
and stopped aftergrass. Insult to injury.
Talk everywhere of fusty fodder, self-combustion.

Ten years ago we built ten thousand bales,
two of us, and climbed the mountain
afterwards to rest in forestry that mearns
sheep pasture, a famine field
of lazy beds. We gazed down from
a cemetery of thirty cairns

across a stonewalled country.
Stacks of bales in circles – our work
stood out like harvest monoliths.
A thousand stones, standing,
speaking, leaning, lying stones,
the key- and cornerstones of myths …

Our farms began in those.
It was as if we tried to read the signs
of Newgrange from the moon. A thistle splinter
brought us back to earth
knowing that we’d gathered of its plenty
enough to fortify our care against the winter.