Collected Poems | Gerard Fanning

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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.”

This Collected Poems gathers the four books Gerard Fanning published during his lifetime—Easter Snow (1992), Working for the Government (1999), Water & Power (2004), and Hombre: New and Selected Poems (2011)—along with his final, unpublished collection, Slip Road, completed shortly before his death in 2017 and published here for the first time. 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.

Praise for 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

INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS: In order to avoid international shipping fees, please order the book directly through our international distributor, Gazelle Book Services. This book is available on their website here: https://gazellebookservices.co.uk/products/9781943667154