{"id":30743,"date":"2010-12-08T07:13:54","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T12:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=30743"},"modified":"2020-11-16T09:21:47","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T14:21:47","slug":"30743","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=30743","title":{"rendered":"The Books: The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry<\/i>: Peter Fallon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

Next book on the shelf is The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon. <\/p>\n

\u2018The 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.\u2019 – 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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nRichard Wilbur wrote of Peter Fallon’s poetry:<\/p>\n

It does not filter the world of the small farm for some urban reader; rather it takes him there. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/i>. In the same way that John McGahern’s books are vast<\/i> 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.”) <\/p>\n

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<\/a> (at age eighteen, no less!!). <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\nThe Gallery Press building, North Meath<\/i><\/p>\n

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<\/i> here<\/a>), as well as his stories. The Gallery Press has also published works by Derek Mahon (my post here<\/a>), Medbh McGuckian (my post here<\/a>), John Montague (my post here<\/a>), Ciaran Carson (my post here<\/a>), Nuala N\u00ed Dhomhnaill (I’ll get to her eventually!), the wonderful John Banville (dude has a whole tag devoted to him<\/a>), Eil\u00e9an N\u00ed Chuillean\u00e1in, Michael Hartnett (my post here<\/a>), 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? <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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!) <\/p>\n

In 1993, he received the O\u2019Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute, and the award read:<\/p>\n

Peter Fallon\u2019s 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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Poetry International wrote of Fallon:<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s poetry has a deceptive simplicity and accessibility even as it affirms the values of endurance, survival and communal life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seamus Heaney wrote of him:<\/p>\n

Peter Fallon\u2019s poetry confirms Keats\u2019s notion that an intelligence becomes a soul through being schooled in a world of pains and troubles. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>, and by looping that in, he connects to something almost mythic, as he says. The landscape alive with ghosts and ancient references. <\/p>\n

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

The Meadow<\/big><\/p>\n

We have wedded the towbar
\nand turned the mower’s eighteen blades –
\nthe mower, the meadow reiver.
\nWe’ll work all night, by the last
\nand first light and, in between, by the minutes
\nof moonlight. This is hay fever.<\/p>\n

For weeks we’ve watched smudged fields
\nweighed down by mean July.
\nWe’ve heard them broadcast
\nbrightness and woken to wet weather.
\nWe’d be better off watching Billy McNamee
\nthan paying heed to the radio forecast.<\/p>\n

When meadows grow he finds a way.
\nWe say we’ll trust our own translation
\nof the sky and start to mow
\nthis evening. We’ll be racing the rain.
\nTomorrow we’ll turn and turn again.
\nMidweek we’ll set the bob to row.<\/p>\n

Then we’ll bale. We did that then,
\nheaded the stacks with loose hay
\nfrom the headlands. We thought we’d won
\nuntil we heard of loss that rotted in rows
\nand stopped aftergrass. Insult to injury.
\nTalk everywhere of fusty fodder, self-combustion.<\/p>\n

Ten years ago we built ten thousand bales,
\ntwo of us, and climbed the mountain
\nafterwards to rest in forestry that mearns
\nsheep pasture, a famine field
\nof lazy beds. We gazed down from
\na cemetery of thirty cairns<\/p>\n

across a stonewalled country.
\nStacks of bales in circles – our work
\nstood out like harvest monoliths.
\nA thousand stones, standing,
\nspeaking, leaning, lying stones,
\nthe key- and cornerstones of myths …<\/p>\n

Our farms began in those.
\nIt was as if we tried to read the signs
\nof Newgrange from the moon. A thistle splinter
\nbrought us back to earth
\nknowing that we’d gathered of its plenty
\nenough to fortify our care against the winter.<\/p>\n