"In an attempt to sail between the Scylla of 'the Irish mode' originally sponsored by Thomas MacDonagh and maintained as a literary category by later writers such as Robert Farren in his book The Course of Irish Verse (1949), and the Charybdis of a more standardized, New Lines-ish, iambic English, I devised a conceit in which Irish experience was to equal vowels and the English literary tradition was to equal consonants, and my poems were to be 'vocables adequate to my whole experience'. It was, admittedly, a fairly Euphuistic conception, but even so, it did signal a genuine stylistic problem, one which has been endemic to Irish writing and whose solution always represents a definite moment in a poet's development." Seamus Heaney on Padraic Fallon • PN Review (1990)

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