- Fallon (1905-1974) came from lovely County Galway and was drawn to Dublin by George Russell (AE) to take part in the Irish Literary Revival. Heaney wrote of him “His sensibility has weathered in Galway the rainy light that was familiar to both Rafferty and Yeats; it has been tutored by a landscape at once elemental and historical; a landscape that holds the walled demesne and the tower as well as the bog-face and the stone wall…”
I came across this poem entitled YESTERDAY’S MAN which contained the following lovely and intriguing stanzas:-
Lines of verse too left littering
After poems that never got away,
A pen drawing, very odd, the storm God Zu
Trusses in his fowl form to a carrying pole;
(From him the wren-walk on St Stephen’s Day)
Copied I suppose, to prove a point,
(Akkadian seal, Babylonian cylinder?) How
Much at home I am in this mad world
Suddenly and again! And here somewhere
You the girl enter
Anonymously, in two wooden stanzas, into which
You have entirely disappeared. Words, words,
That’s all you are, girl who never
Was a lover. And I likened you,
Body I could see through, to a catapult
The poem concerns itself with writing poetry and the poet looking through his notebooks and considering lost loves, regret and all in a stormy atmosphere. I like the variation between detail , here about the paraphernalia of writing and the vagueness…”here somewhere”. The latter representing ageing disorientation.
More on Fallon may be found at preview.co.uk where Seamus Heaney has written an appreciation and quotes some lines about Lands End.
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