Strong, My Love by Peter Fallon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Strong, My Love by Peter Fallon Joseph Heininger Strong, My Love by Peter Fallon, pp. 95. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press (2014). €11.95. Readers of contemporary Irish poetry have learned to appreciate the many gifts that Peter Fallon brings to his poetry: a love of the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid; a love for composing the sounds and rhythms of a colloquial and resonant speech; and a love for communicating his knowledge of the land and his deep attachment to its domesticated and other creatures. As Seamus Heaney said of his friend and fellow practitioner, Fallon’s ethic of personal and paternal care has grown to be both broad and deep-rooted in its aesthetic and moral applications. Because it is evident how thoroughly intertwined he has made these realms, Fallon’s pastoral care now includes the land he farms and the flocks he raises and, in their sonic and visual shaping, the lines he creates in expressing his craftsman’s love and care for the language. Fallon opens his new collection with an epigraph from St. John of the Cross: “When the evening of this life comes we shall be judged on love.” Many of the poems are devoted to exploring the diverse manifestations, expressions, and difficulties of love. With regard to stories of great lovers, the poet’s inspiration is often classical, as in his renderings of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. He has given us Virgil’s scenes from the Orphic underworld in his memorable [End Page 156] translation of The Georgics (2004); now, in Strong, My Love, he turns to the music of Ovid in creating another version, “The Two in It.” The first two stanzasread: When she, after the serpent struck, paled into the lower world he, in the upper still, launched his lament, then ventured down to her new realm. ‘O deities of dark, I beg of you, this is too cruel a whelm.’ These lines are much shorter than the variable iambic line that Fallon used in translating the Virgilian version of the myth. Here, he consistently uses short lines and significant end-rhymes, and invents an evocative verb, “paled,” to describe Eurydice’s weakened movement from earth down into Hades. He also imports an Anglo-Saxon-derived noun to name her fate, which he calls “a whelm,” and so readers hear the echo of “overwhelm” and envision her imprisonment in Hades. After this beginning, the poem continues for another eighty lines, and it concludes with a narrative commentary on Orpheus’ fate: A solace for both day and morrow, he shaped consoling songs out of the shards of his own sorrow. The play of the sibilants in these lines moves from “solace” to “consoling songs” and then from “shards” to “sorrow,” making truly poignant the sharp notes of sorrow and regret that characterize Orpheus’ singing after he has lost Eurydice a second time. In a different, but still classical vein, Fallon also brings to his readers’ attention some short lyrics adapted from the Latin poet Tibullus. Three poems are denoted as “after Tibullus”: “The Weight of Wealth,” “Love Ties,” and “Way Lit by Love.” They are characterized by wit and worldly insight, as when the speaker of the first poem decisively turns away from the quest for wealth to find love’s solace: What’s sweeter than to listen to ferocious gales that race and crash outside, while I safeguard a woman in a firm embrace? [End Page 157] The speaker of “The Weight of Wealth” then concludes: For this, for this I blissfully forgo my claim to any gain to favour him who can endure the surging seas, the driving rain. Later in the collection, in a tone of rueful lamentation, “The Man Who Never Was” speaks the poet’s fatherly thoughts about the unlived years of life of his son, John. In this volume as in earlier ones, Fallon’s elegies are among his best poems, and the six pastoral lines he composes in “The Farther Shore” for his friend Tim Engelland demonstrate this clearly: When you asked to see the home place I led you to the pond we’d let go every summer, where we’d net...