The Company of Horses (review)

Although Peter Fallon's name is likely unfamiliar to many Irish literary scholars in America, Fallon is much better known in Ireland as a publisher, editor, and poet in his own right. Until the publication of The Company of Horses, Fallon had not released a volume of poetry in this country since his News of the World: Selected Poems (1993) and in Ireland since his expanded News of the World: Selected and New Poems (1998). Part of his poetic silence is due to his long labor on The Georgics of Virgil (2004), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and praised by Seamus Heaney and Eamon Grennan, among other poets and critics. He has also had to deal with the growing demands of running the Gallery Press and operating a sheep farm (the latter of which he has lately given up).

The Company of Horses is dedicated to the American poet and neo-agrarian writer Wendell Berry, whose friendship with Fallon suggests their common interest in the interrelationships among the land, humans, plants, and animals. This new volume is classic Fallon: not only in its wonder-filled portrayal of the flora and fauna surrounding Fallon's home in Oldcastle, County Meath, but also in his evocative sketches of nature farther a field, near Ballynahinch in Connemara.

One notable, and attractive, development in these new poems is the way in which Fallon's verbs assume a more central role than they do in much of the earlier poetry. As an example of his lines' new verbal dynamism, consider both the imperative tone and the action of verbs in the volume's initial offering, "Go." Each of the six stanzas is anchored in the energy of a particular active verb: "go" and "bear" in stanzas one and two, respectively; "convalesces" and "Look" in stanza three; "see" in stanza four; "shreds" and "has stalled" in stanza five; and "glisten," "is telling," and "Listen," all in stanza six. Looking back at my favorite Fallon poem, "Fostering"—a sonnet that was originally published in Winter Work (1983) I find that verbs abound but that the persistent presence of the speaker's first-person voice diminishes the force of the verbs. The use of the second-person pronoun in"Go," however, both enables the speaker to focus more clearly on the poem's subject—reading his own life through the signs of nature—and invites the reader into this natural world. The tonal urgency of this opening poem stems from the poet's reveling in the still moments of joy and contemplation he finds in observing nature and its inhabitants in many of the poems that follow "Go"—all the while realizing that his time on earth is limited, a point he makes directly in the conclusion of the collection's final poem, "Day and Night": "I have loved my term / on earth."A lesser poet would have been content with "time on earth," but Fallon's noun choice makes clear he knows his own time is limited, while additionally suggesting the educational aspect of his immersion in nature.

As a hunter, I was delighted to read a trio of poems about pheasants, "Morning Glory,""A Holy Show," and "Fair Game."These poems not only high-light the heightened verbal thrust of Fallon's new poetry, but also suggest his new emphasis on pared-down and end-stopped lines, which are also found in the lovely sketches that comprise the lyric sequence "Ballynahinch Postcards." Fallon luxuriates in words themselves more than he ever has in this volume, as his increased employment of assonance and alliteration demonstrate. If there is a poem that exemplifies the new Fallon poetry, it must be "A Brighter Blue (Bally na hinch Postscript)," which follows the "Bally na hinch Postcards." Here, vibrant colors abound, often linked to imprecatory verbs: "Wash the sky / a brighter blue"; "Reignite the embers / of rhododendron, Golden Rain." The urgent tone that drives "Go" emerges again here with a more energetic ending than that opening poem conveys, as...