Look in the Mirror and Other Poems

Padraic Fallon was long recognised in Ireland as an outstanding poet, and also as an important radio dramatist, storywriter and essayist. But he had an aversion to book publication and refused to collect his poems until shortly before his death.

'There are poets who make sense in their poems,' writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to this book. 'And then there are poets who also make sense of the literature they belong to, and continue to shed light on it whenever their work is read. Padraic Fallon belongs to this second category. His poems continue to illuminate us.' Fallon published little in his lifetime but is now recognised as a major poet. He inherited a tradition of Irish culture redefined by Yeats, and contributed to it poems that combine lyricism with ironic clear-sightedness. Responding to the landscapes and history of Ireland, Fallon looks outwards, too, to European literature and the complexities of the modern world. 'Padraic Fallon comes to us now as much a contemporary as he was when he began,' Seamus Heaney declares.