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.

'Care, company, community have been fundamental concerns of Peter Fallon’s writing in and about the world, care for people and place, for planet earth and the poetry of earth, for the values espoused in Virgil’s Georgics which he has translated . . . and the seriousness of that caretaking has developed over the years to a point where the artistic and the moral have converged.'  Seamus Heaney, June 2010

'Strong, My Love is a fine book, deeply satisfying, and further evidence of Peter Fallon’s stature in contemporary letters as not just, through Gallery Press, the most important publisher of poetry but as a poet of real standing and significance.'  Richard Hayes, Dublin Review of Books