Peter Fallon: Poet, Publisher, Editor and Translator ed. by Richard Rankin Russell (review)

Peter Fallon founded the Gallery Press in 1970, and in the four decades since then has edited and published hundreds of collections, shaping the way we read contemporary poetry in Ireland, and extending his editorial influence to the United Kingdom and the United States. Yet, like many great editors before him, his tends to be a quiet presence, the director in the wings, credited but rarely himself on stage.

Peter Fallon: Poet, Publisher, Editor and Translator, seeks to redress this gap in scholarly appreciation. The volume’s title indicates the many roles Fallon plays in contemporary letters, and the essays on his work and poems written for him have been organized into five broad categories in order to pay fair due to his career as an editor and publisher, and as a poet and translator. With the exception of the poems collected in Fallon’s honor—which are, by and large, personal or only loosely or tangentially a commentary on Fallon’s work—the sections function primarily to pay tribute to Fallon’s distinction as a poet of the natural world. As Fallon’s acclaimed translation of Virgil’s Georgics attests, his sensibility is agrarian and attuned to the intersection of human work and the land beneath our feet.

The collection’s first section, on the Gallery Press, is short, as if to foreground discussion by acknowledging the press’s far-reaching role in the Irish literary landscape but then quickly move on to Fallon’s role as poet and translator. One reads Dennis O’Driscoll’s broad-stroked and illuminating “Peter Fallon Revisited” with a sad sense of irony, for the notion of “revisiting” a poet’s work is so often an elegiac critical practice, a reconsideration of an oeuvre at the poet’s death. Here, we are reminded that it is O’Driscoll who is prematurely dead. Likewise, a reader feels the same sense of premature loss reading Seamus Heaney’s brief introduction to Gallery, a talk originally made in honor of the press’s fortieth anniversary celebration at the Abbey Theatre in 2010 and published here for the first time. By including tributes from such nationally and internationally recognized voices, Russell pays homage to Fallon’s influence and reach as an editor and poet.

Heaney describes lyric poems—and presents Gallery poets as exemplary at this work—as “snapshots of the individual consciousness” and as “an intimate swift glimpse of the spiritual and cultural state of their place and times.” The essays in the latter sections of the volume apply such definitions to Fallon’s own books of lyric poetry, as well as to his translations and adaptations. The best of these essays raise questions about poetry generally, and tease out Fallon’s particular concerns. Maurice Harmon offers a broad overview of Fallon’s lyric poetry, focusing on the relationship between the contemporary and the historical, and between local customs and national news. His essay reveals tensions between the poet’s need to belong to a local, rooted community and the aesthetic necessity of remaining distanced from the subjects about which he writes. These are Fallon’s concerns, but also relevant to the study of lyric poetry in nearly every culture.

Several essayists explore the way Fallon’s poetry navigates the place of private grief and the personal lyric in a poetic repertoire that seeks to speak from, or be included within the community at large. This is an abiding concern for lyric poets in general, and essays by Ed Madden, Justin Quinn, and Joseph Heininger argue for the place of lyric poetry as a response to--and even an intervention in—social and political debates. These essays overwhelmingly reinforce a sense of Fallon’s rootedness in a particular place. Even those devoted to gender, form, or other aspects of the poetry seem to connect—as if by homing gear—to Fallon’s farm in Loughcrew and the poet’s experiences as a sheep farmer with “his...