Create me, says the poet, I am a body
For every word, and the large word that was lost
And the word you'd throw a dog;
Transform me who travel towards infinity
In a makeshift monologue.
    from 'Johnstown Castle'
   

Introduction by Eavan Boland

'There are poets who make sense in their poems,' writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to this selection. 'And then there are poets who also make sense of the literature they belong to, and continue to shed light on it whenever their work is read. Padraic Fallon belongs to this second category. His poems continue to illuminate us.'

Fallon published little in his lifetime, but is now recognised as a major poet. He inherited a tradition of Irish culture redefined by Yeats, and contributed to it poems that combine lyricism with ironic clearsightedness. Responding to the landscapes and history of Ireland, Fallon looks outwards, too, to European literature and the complexities of the modern world. This new selection presents a generous range of his poetry, with notes and a biographical outline by his son Brian Fallon

Padraic Fallon comes to us now as much a contemporary as he was when he began.
    Seamus Heaney