Gerard Fanning is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish poetry, "an enigmatic surveyor with an appetite for the exotic cultivar," as one reviewer has called him, a maker of taut yet limpid verse. Hombre: New and Selected Poems gathers the poet's choice of his three previous collections, together with twenty-five new poems which show him to be both spontaneous and inventive and, all the while, formally-grounded, full of what another reviewer has called "elegant intensity." 'Gerard Fanning's poems are perfectly pitched; their phrasing and tonal shape range from the use of...