Peter Fallon: Poet, Publisher, Editor and Translator

Description

In this unique volume, edited by Richard Rankin Russell, a luminous group of Irish and international writers gather to pay tribute to Irish publisher and poet Peter Fallon, recognising his immense contribution to literary and artistic life in Ireland and beyond. Essays on Fallon’s life and literary legacy have been contributed by a distinguished group, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Dennis O’Driscoll, Maurice Harmon, Justin Quinn and Wendell Berry.

Part Five is an exclusive and moving collection of new poems in honour of Fallon by his friends and fellow poets Richard Wilbur, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson amongst many others.

Peter Fallon has run The Gallery Press since 1970, publishing hundreds of titles in Irish poetry, drama and fiction, and with Timothy Engelland established The Deerfield Press in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Fallon has written many volumes of his own poetry; co-edited, with Derek Mahon, the influential 1990 collection The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry; adapted into dramatic form Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn; published an acclaimed translation of Virgil’s Georgics in 2004 and will shortly publish a translation from Hesiod, Deeds and Their Days. In 2009 he received an Alumni Award from Trinity College, Dublin, was appointed Adjunct Professor of English in 2010, and is a member of the prestigious arts group Aosdána.

In honour of Fallon’s importance as the leading publisher of Irish poetry, as editor, translator and as a poet himself, this celebratory collection in his honour carries contributions from a number of the poets he publishes.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Richard Rankin Russell

Part One: Fallon and The Gallery Press

1. Thomas Dillon Redshaw, ‘The Dublin Festival, Dublin, 1970: Capella, The Book of Invasions, and the Original Gallery Books’;
2. Seamus Heaney, ‘Gallery at the Abbey: An Introduction for the 40th Anniversary Reading’
3. Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘Peter Fallon Revisited’
4. Derek Mahon, ‘Works and Days’

Part Two: The Contours of Fallon’s Creative Work

1. Maurice Harmon, ‘The Profane Rituals of Peter Fallon’
2. John McAuliffe, ‘Double Vision: Peter Fallon’s Landscapes with Figures’
3. Thomas O’Grady, ‘“This blooming place”: Peter Fallon’s Tarry Flynn’
4. Ed Madden, ‘Fellow Feeling: or Mourning, Metonymy, Masculinity’

Part Three: Fallon and the Natural World

1. Shaun O’Connell, ‘All That Lasts: Peter Fallon’s Loughcrew’
2. Richard Rankin Russell, ‘Nature’s News: The Place(s) of Peter Fallon’s Poetry’
3. Justin Quinn, ‘The Obscenities and Audiences of Peter Fallon’
4. Joseph Heininger, Peter Fallon’s Georgics: Praises, Lessons, and Lamentations in Virgil’s ‘Studies of the Arts of Peace’

Part Four: Fallon and America

1. Joyce Peseroff, ‘Notes on Peter Fallon’s Deerfield Series’
2. Bryan Giemza, ‘The News of Poetry, or, What Love Does Life Require’?
3. Wendell Berry, ‘Foreword’ to Airs and Angels by Peter Fallon
4. Richard Wilbur, ‘Horsetail’ and ‘Sugar Maples, January’

Part Five: Poems in Honor of Peter Fallon

1. Medbh McGuckian, ‘On Cutting One’s Finger while Reaching for Jasmine’
2. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘The Dark Room’
3. Paul Muldoon, ‘Colmcille on Exile’
4. Conor O’Callaghan, ‘Revision’
5. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘An Cahor Aduaidh’/‘The Northern Lights’
6. Seamus Heaney, ‘The Dapple-Grey Mare’
7. Michael Coady, ‘The Given Light’
8. Allan Gillis, ‘Before What Will Come After’
9. John McAuliffe, ‘The Shed’
10. Eamon Grennan, ‘Minute’, ‘Out and About’, and ‘Leaving’
11. David Wheatley, ‘The Blue Pencil’ and ‘The Bee-Hive’
12. Gerard Smyth, ‘Ancestral Roads’
13. Vona Groarke, ‘Monet’s Palette, Musée Marmottan’
14. Ciarán Carson, ‘Blackberries’

About the Editor

Richard Rankin Russell is Professor of English at Baylor University in Texas and teaches Irish and twentieth-century British literature. He has written books on Bernard MacLaverty and Brian Friel and has a study of Seamus Heaney and regionalism in press.