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Collected Poems by Gerard Fanning
“Gerard Fanning produced poems that are among the best written anywhere in the past half-century.”
– Colm Tóibín
“[H]ighly distinctive, unforced and resonant poetry.”
– Gerald Dawe
“Close cousin to the poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Derek Mahon, there is a mortal loveliness to his lyrics.”
– John McAuliffe
“These poems are elliptical, at times cryptic; they mostly don’t so much perform as talk quietly into their shirt sleeves … this is a poetry of overhearing, eschewing careless talk, or the loose lip.”
– Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
About the Book
From his first collection in 1992, Gerard Fanning established himself, in the words of Gerard Smyth, as a poet enduring “almost by stealth … forging a distinctive style that is striking for its originality.” With understated formal elegance, Fanning’s poetry has the cool and control of the Hollywood westerns he admired, dense with allusions to American music and contemporary cinema, and equally attentive to Ireland’s eastern and western seascapes. These are poems which welcome and reward investigation, “where hymn is an amalgam of flutter and whisper, where rhymes / fall in with their echo.”
Edited by Fanning’s wife Bríd Ní Chuilinn and poet / novelist Conor O’Callaghan, this collection includes generous contributions from Gerald Dawe and Colm Tóibín, Fanning’s contemporaries and friends, offering context and key insights both for familiar readers and for those new to this remarkable body of work.
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About the Author
Gerard Fanning (1952–2017) was one of the most distinctive of his generation of Irish poets. Gerard Fanning was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1952. A graduate of University College Dublin, he worked for a time in Barcelona, teaching English. He worked for the Irish Civil Service in Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. He published three collections of poetry with the Dedalus Press: Easter Snow (1992), Working for the Government (1999) and Water & Power (2004), and a chapbook, Canower Sound (2003), with the Shinbone Press. He is a recipient of the Rooney Prize.
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