From his first collection in 1992, Gerard Fanning established himself, in the words of Gerard Smyth, as a poet enduring " almost by stealth ... forging a distinctive style that is striking for its originality." With understated formal elegance, Fanning's poetry has the cool and control of the Hollywood westerns he admired, dense with allusions to American music and contemporary cinema, and equally attentive to Ireland's eastern and western seascapes. These are poems which welcome and reward investigation, " where hymn is an amalgam of flutter and whisper, where rhymes / fall in with their echo." This Collected Poems gathers the four books Gerard Fanning published during his lifetime-- Easter Snow (1992), Working for the Government (1999), Water & Power (2004), and Hombre: New and Selected Poems (2011)-- along with his final, unpublished collection, Slip Road, completed shortly before his death in 2017 and published here for the first time. Edited by Fanning's wife Bri d Ni Chuilinn and poet / novelist Conor O' Callaghan, this collection includes contributions from Gerald Dawe and Colm To ibi n, Fanning's contemporaries and friends, offering key insights for this remarkable body of work.