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At the heart of Strong, My Love, Peter Fallon’s first collection in seven years, is a series of prayers for his daughter and son and for their generation. Though time and its tolls pervade the book (‘When my old friend / falters on a stair / or founders on a word or name . . .’) the author would ‘wake and want to give / the ordinary day / its due’. Snatches of Tibullus pave the way for two extended translations (‘Of countryside I sing, and country gods’) by this contemporary of Virgil. These potent, moving poems touch on history and its consequences while the book as a whole supports Wendell Berry’s assessment that Peter Fallon ‘writes with an acute particularity of eye and ear, recording ordinary events made extraordinary by the amplitude of his care and the precision of his notice’.

Author: Peter Fallon