SOFT DAY . . .

Somewhere—I think on a bookshelf in my office—I have an anthology of contemporary (at the time) Irish writing that I added to my personal library way back in 1980. I have not looked at it in a while, but I thought of it today as I ventured out into what the Irish would surely call a “soft day” in Boston: a bit foggy with a light mist falling steadily and with a false hint of brightening behind the low overcast. A perfect day to cross the border into the People’s Republic of Cambridge for lunch at Grafton Street in Harvard Square with my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell and our mutual friend Irish publisher and poet Peter Fallon, who happens to have been co-editor of that long-ago anthology . . . titled Soft Day.

I first met Peter in 1980 when I was in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame and he was out to America promoting that book: I have thus known him longer than I’ve known my wife! Over the years, we’ve crossed paths a half-dozen times or so—each time the occasion involving Peter stepping out of the impressive shadow cast by his primary literary identity as publisher of Gallery Books, the leading poetry press in Ireland for the past four decades, and stepping into the spotlight as a truly fine poet in his own right.

Mostly Peter is a poet of life on and around a family farm in the Irish midlands. “I think it exquisite,” he wrote in the title poem of his volume Winter Work (1983), “to stand in the yard, my feet on the ground, / in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit.” Obviously, bucolic County Meath could hardly compete for headlines with the poetry of so many of his contemporaries engaging with the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland during that same period. Yet Peter continued to be true to his own small world, and the body of his poetry that has accumulated over several decades testifies to the quiet assertion he makes, relative to the Northern Troubles, in “My Care” (also from Winter Work):

All I ever wanted was
to make a safe house in the midlands.

‘How’s all you care?’ I’m asked.
‘Grand. And yours?’ I don’t repeat
my worry for my care, my country. When I go home
the animals are healthy, safe. There’s that.

There’s that, indeed. And in his most recent volume of poems, The Company of Horses (Gallery Books, 2007), Peter Fallon continues to work finely nuanced variations on the themes of place-centeredness that have defined his writing from the beginning. One poem that I really like from this new volume is “A Winter Solstice,” not just for Peter’s signature engagement with his familiar beloved place in north Meath—here heightened by his wonderful weaving and unweaving of the metaphorical and the literal in the language of the poem—but also for his signature music, those quiet yet certain end rhymes of lines 2, 4, and 6 in each stanza, their mathematical predictability subtly subverted by the poet’s deft management of irregular line length. Peter Fallon is not a prolific poet (this is his first full-length volume of new lyric poems since 1998). He thus makes every word and every line and every stanza count:

A WINTER SOLSTICE

A low sun leans across
the fields of County Meath
like thirty watts behind
a dirty blind. New year begins to breathe
new life into the ground.
The winter wheat begins to teethe.

The tarmac streams like precious ore
beside wrapped bales bright in the glare.
Crows shake like collies by a puddle
blooms of spray, and they declare—
a boy’s voice breaking in the throat
of morning—a prayer

that works to scour the slate
of unimaginable
hurt. We draw breath in the air—
its shapes are almost tangible—
and the breath and sweat of horses
makes a minor mist—beautiful.

And beautiful the light on water
as the age’s newly minted coin.
You’d be hard pressed from here
to tell a withered elm across the Boyne
from an ash that’s hibernating.
Past and present join

in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive
with losses, yes, and lessons too,
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice—to live; to thrive.