Description
Gerard Fanning is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish poetry, “an enigmatic surveyor with an appetite for the exotic cultivar”, as one reviewer has called him, a maker of taut yet limpid verse. Introduced by Gerald Dawe, Hombre: New and Selected Poems gathers the poet’s own choice of his three previous collections, together with twenty-five new poems which manage to be both spontaneous and inventive and at the same time formally-grounded, full of what another reviewer called “elegant intensity”.
‘These poems combine a tone that is intimate and urgent with a formal reticence and an absolute care and respect for language’. — Colm Tóibín, ‘Books of the Year’, The Irish Times
“Fanning’s poems… for all their quietude and hesitancy, their off-hand and often offbeat comments, their guarded privacies and sequestered emotions, sing with an elegant intensity” — Conor Kelly, Poetry Review
“The fluent and accomplished Gerard Fanning paces broad fields, an enigmatic surveyor with an appetite for the exotic cullivar” — Katherine Washburn, The Irish Times
An Evening in Booterstown
After cold days taking photographs
confirming the nearest coastline,
I look from your window
and see how the tramp fields
have turned to a wax impression
of the sea’s other shores. Reclining
like a folded mirror, or growing
in detail just as these blank papers
on the tray near the alcove
swim in their blue chemicals,
they gather the last of Dublin’s
refracted light. See there
emerging from the covering darkness
of lintels, bay-windows and shut
doors, another circle of light corrects
the skyline. Like any brief town
time has polished it, with
the sea-marsh and the harbour wall,
to a pale permanence.
