PoetryThe Company of Horses is Peter Fallon's first collection of new poetry since 1998 and follows his 2004 translation of Virgil's Georgics. Fallon admires Virgil for the way in which he infuses "his descriptions of a way of life with prescriptions for a way to live".
In their attention to detail, and with their sensory awareness of small changes in the landscape, the poems in The Company of Horses take up the Vergilian mode, without pastiche or imitation.
Go, the first poem in the collection, makes clear how we should read what follows: "The morning is telling/ you/ your life. Listen". And Fallon is a great listener and observer. The landscapes of his poetry are textured with hope and decay, light and darkness, life and death, and each opposite is intertwined with the other so that no idealised pastoral indulgences are possible.
Pheasants bob and strut through the first few poems. When a hen pheasant "bows" "before the corn goddess" we seem to be asked to accept that some neo-pagan spirit animates the place which these poems and their creatures inhabit. But two poems later a cock pheasant is "howling like a heretic/ in the bonfire of his infidel/ and ruffled feathers" - the imagery is not only darker but altogether more worldly and, indeed, (like Virgil in his day) contemporarily political.
The next poem, Fair Game, sees a pheasant shot in "a final flare", and any mistaken notion the reader might have had about the connection between the natural world and its gods and goddesses is dispelled. The pheasant's unnatural place in the landscape, as an interloping species introduced for the very purpose of being game, is as much part of Fallon's vision as is the hen apparently paying her respects to the deities.
THE COMPANY OF Horses most clearly echoes a Vergilian way of seeing the landscape in its understanding that "nature" is always touched and shaped by the human. In Ballynahinch Postcards (some of which appeared in a chapbook of the same name earlier this year) there is a sequence of thoughts which wonders about the weight of sin on a day when it is impossible to tell "where the mist ends/ and cloud begins". This Genesis-like, face-of-the-deep beginning leads on to contemplation of a cottage around which Edenic apples grow, ready to give real weight to sin. And the next section, just like Genesis, moves from sin to death and murder as the poem meets "beaters flushing woodcock".
Wherever Fallon encounters the turning of the seasons, the particularity of species or the sounds of the natural world, there is always a human presence. Sometimes it is in agricultural work. Sometimes it is in human self-indulgence. Most often it is simply in his presence as an admiring, wondering cataloguer.
THE POEMS IN The Company of Horses also radiate out from their parish to the rest of the world. Most memorably, A Refrain celebrates the glories of the synchronised free-form flocking of starlings. The poem doesn't rest content there, though, as a vivid description of the "petrol stains" on their iridescent plumage becomes a reminder of starlings' migration over "oil fields on fire" on the Tigris and Euphrates.
For Fallon, on a small and on a global scale, ecology happens at the point at which the human and the natural meet - here in the ecological disasters which came on the foot of a war which was arguably "about" the possession and control of a natural resource.
The Company of Horses melds the bursting life of the natural world with the often sinful presence of human beings who alter that world. Fallon avoids giving the animals in his poems human traits or his humans animal traits, and instead leaves open the ways in which we should understand ourselves in the world. These poems are not ashamed to celebrate this uncertainty, and so Fallon can end by stating simply: "I have loved my term/ on earth".
Colin Graham teaches English at NUI Maynooth and is co-editor of The Irish Review
The Company of Horses By Peter Fallon Gallery Press, 65pp. €11.95