'The instructive thing about Collected Poems is the spectacle it affords of a writer gradually and consciously negotiating his way through his influences and managing, with a mild but ineradicable self-confidence, to cultivate his own voice and his own subjects. Fallon's oeuvre can now be seen to stand in secure and complementary relation to the achievements of Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh.'

So writes Seamus Heaney in his introduction to Brian Fallon's definitive edition of his father's verse. Almost two hundred poems, translations, and songs, covering half a century's work 'remind us, in fact, of what his best work demonstrates: that Padraic Fallon comes to us now as much a contemporary as he was when he began'.