‘The instructive thing about Collected Poems is the spectacle it affords of a writer gradually and consciously negotiating his way through his influences and managing, with a mild but ineradicable self-confidence, to cultivate his own voice and his own subjects. Fallon’s oeuvre can now be seen to stand in secure and complementary relation to the achievements of Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh.’ — so writes Seamus Heaney in his introduction to Brian Fallon’s definitive edition of his father’s verse. Almost two hundred poems, translations, and songs, covering half a century’s work ‘remind us, in fact, of what his best work demonstrates: that Padraic Fallon comes to us now as much a contemporary as he was when he began’.
