'by the Black Stream', Padraic Fiacc (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 1969 Padraic Fiacc's By the Black Stream: Selected Poems 1947-1967 was published by Dolmen Press in their Poetry Ireland Editions series. By the Black Stream was number seven. (1) The Dolmen Press book was 'set in Pilgrim type and printed and published by The Dolmen Press Limited, 8 Herbert Place, Dublin 2 in the Republic of Ireland' and distributed 'outside Ireland, except in Canada and the United States of America, by Oxford University Press, and in America by Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Spring, Pennsylvania, 19425'. The poems, forty-one in all, had appeared, as the subtitle made plain, in the previous two decades in various Irish publications including The Irish Times, The Irish Bookman, The Irish Press, The Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland, Threshold, The Honest Ulsterman, New Irish Writing, and The Kilkenny Magazine, as well as being broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland. Several had been included in the important postwar anthology published in the US, New Irish Poetry, in which Fiacc had been the youngest contributor. (2) In the brief cover note to By the Black Stream the reader is informed: