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'Peter
Fallon's poetry has become very tough and alive, like a just-cut
holly stick. Snappy and weighty. Very strong, sharp savour — and
where do you find that these days.'
— Ted Hughes
Peter Fallon was born in Germany in 1951 and grew up on his uncle's
farm near Kells in County Meath. He is an Honours Graduate of
Trinity College, Dublin, where, in 1994 he was Writer in Residence.
At the age of eighteen he founded The Gallery Press which has
published more than four hundred books of poems and plays by the
country's finest established and emerging authors and which is
recognized as Ireland's pre-eminent literary publishing house.
Peter Fallon has given readings all over the US, in Europe, Canada, and
Japan. He has conducted workshops at The Irish Writers' Centre,
Cúirt (The International Writers' Festival, Galway) and the
Yeats International Summer School (1999 and 2002). In 1990 he edited,
with Derek Mahon, the best-selling anthology The Penguin Book
of Contemporary Irish Poetry.
His selected poems, News of the World, was published by Wake
Forest University Press in 1993. An expanded edition, News of
the World: Selected and New Poems, was published in Ireland
in 1998 and was included in The Irish Times 'Books of the
Year'.
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The
Georgics of Virgil, a translation, was published in September
2004. A dramatization of Tarry Flynn, the novel by Patrick
Kavanagh, received its first production "off Broadway" (in Pennsylvania, actually!) the same month. The Georgics was subsequently published by Oxford in its World's Classics series.
A new collection of poems, The Company of Horses, appeared in September 2007.
Peter
Fallon received the 1993 O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish
American Cultural Institute. He was Poet in Residence (1996-97)
at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and, in the Spring of 2000,
he was the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova
University. In 2003 he was elected to Aosdána. He lives with
his family in Loughcrew in County Meath.
'I
have the greatest liking for Peter Fallon's poetry. It does not
filter the world of the small farm for some urban reader; rather
it takes him there. It does so without sentimentality, giving us
for instance the brute weariness of farm work (Pastorale)
as well as the triumph of work well done (The Old Masters).
On the whole, Fallon's words move artfully within the lexicon of
the rural town; their poetry is in the rightness of naming and describing,
the exact ear for the beat and savor of country speech, the honest
tuning of the poet's feeling toward his chosen place. '
— Richard Wilbur
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