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for the Government (1999), Water & Power (2004), and Hombre: New and Selected Poems (2011)— along with his final, unpublished collection, Slip Road, completed shortly before his death in 2017 and published here for the first time.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 Brí d Ní Chuilinn and poet / novelist Conor O’ Callaghan, this collection includes contributions from Gerald Dawe and Colm Tó ibí n, Fanning’ s contemporaries and friends, offering key insights for this remarkable body of work.
