The publication of Peter Fallon's News of the World: Selected and New Poems (Gallery Press, £12.95/£7.95) is something of an event. This volume assembles important poems from several collections, now out of print, together with more recent work. The result has made visible a substantial body of poetry the significance of which is too often eclipsed by Fallon's role as founding editor of the Gallery Press.
For one who has occupied such a central place in Irish letters, Fallon's oeuvre is surprisingly, and refreshingly, lacking in self-conscious literariness. Almost all of this work is rural-based, but Fallon is no naive pastoralist; he eschews what Empson once described as the "essential trick" of pastoral, the reduction of social complexity to the level of im mutable natural order. In this writing the decisions which pertain to the husbandry of a small farm are mirrored by the poet's own aesthetic choices. "The Lost Field" envisions "The things you could do with a field" in what is also a statement of value and a declaration of artistic intent: "I'm out to find that field, to make it mine." The maturity of this poetry is evinced by a careful, seldom uncritical investment in the local and natural. Poems such as "Carnaross 2", "Possessed" or "Airs and Graces" show that Fallon is alert to the dark side of rural life, yet his balance and avoidance of sensationalism are commendable: "And maybe he touched the little girls,/and maybe he didn't." "Don't be gawking," the protagonist of this poem is told, and in contrast to the artful voyeurism of Heaney's "Punishment", Fallon's quiet assertions and protests are characterised by a fastidiousness and tact that are rare. Because the poems bear witness to a valued way of life and a poet's lived investment in it, they very convincingly accommodate the kind of rural demotic and humorous collo quialisms that in the work of any other writer would sound trite.
"The Rag-tree, Boherard" is typical of this lightness of touch that nevertheless masks considerable sophistication. It is again demonstrated in "A Part of Ourselves", the volume's most outstanding poem, a perfectly achieved elegy fit to stand alongside Jon Silkin's "Death of a Son".
Part Two of News of the World provides a shift in perspective, as the poet confronts the alien landscape of Western Massachusetts. "Strength of Heart", written for the bicentennial celebrations of Deer field Academy, is an equally responsible piece of historical writing. That Fallon's poetics should comfortably adapt itself to an American scene is unsurprising, considering the strong influence on his own work of writers such as Robert Frost and Wendell Berry. This landscape, in which the subject is an observant and respectful visitor, provides an effective contrast to the more domesticated country of the book's first half. It acts as a pleasing counterpoint to the Irish poems in this important and rewarding volume.
Brendan Kennelly's The Man Made of Rain (Bloodaxe, £7.95 in UK) is the visionary outcome of the poet's recent surgery for a serious heart complaint. As he lies in his hospital bed, Kennelly is visited by the eponymous man made of rain, who prompts him to a series of meditations on illness and mortality, broadening to a commentary on Kennelly's usual themes of life, love and the evils of cynicism.
Despite its aspirations to visionary status, however, Kennelly's writing is curiously lacking in visual impact; he rarely describes or observes, preferring a conversational patter based on freewheeling verbal associations. T.S. Eliot's "familiar ghost" in the visionary second section of "Little Gidding" speaks of the writer's purpose as being "to purify the dialect of the tribe", but Kennelly's visions impel him to no such stringency. As with his last two volumes The Book of Judas and Poetry My Arse, this work constitutes a single long poem. Its divisions, though, tend to be somewhat arbitrary; large-scale structuring is not his strong point.
What the book conveys is a vivid sense of Kennelly's belief in the redemptive powers of emotion and a primal innocence which is reminiscent of Kavanagh. Where Kavanagh's lyrics allowed for a less doctrinaire, more personal vision of redemption, however, Kennelly's is a proselytising rhetoric. Those already converted will have no difficulty welcoming The Man Made of Rain.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic