A Poet's Journal and Other Writings

Poet and playwright Padraic Fallon (1905-74) was an active and prolific reviewer-critic in the leading Irish periodicals of his day. He wrote principally for Dublin Magazine, The Bell and The Irish Times where he was befriended by its famous editor R.M. Smyllie. He came to know the leading Irish literary figures of his time - Yeats, George Russell (AE) and most especially Austin Clarke, with whom he shared a serious engagement with the Gaelic literary tradition. The essay-reviews here include his influential 'Poets' Journal' from The Bell, with connective pieces on Synge, Yeats, AE, O'Casey, F.R. Higgins, James Stephens, Graves, Pound, MacNeice, Kinsella, Hughes and Larkin, salted by others on the Elizabethan playwright Cyril Tourneur and Ibsen. In this interpretive work he proves himself a lucid, eloquent modernist of the first order. This volume, marks the centenary of Fallon's birth in Athenry, Co. Galway. It is introduced and edited by his son, The Irish Times critic and writer Brian Fallon, who has also edited his father's Poems and Versions (1983), Collected Poems (1990) and Collected Plays (2005).