The poems which Peter Sirr published in magazines and newspapers — and which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Listowel poetry prize — generated unusual interest in a first collection.

His delight in language and images can now be savoured. Playful, inventive, and at the same time encompassing harsher realities, Marginal Zones displays a talent that is both promising and accomplished.

These marginal zones are both literal places and points of acute psychological tension experienced by people who, for one reason or another, have been marginalized.

Peter Sirr adopts a wide variety of voices — Lazarus living out the aftermath of a miracle, an academic charting the demise of Irish along a remote Western coast, a suburban housewife, a deposed king — for his despatches from different points of this fringe.

Marginal Zones is an exciting and auspicious debut.

'. . . a distinguished, convincing debut by an evidently gifted poet'
                                                                                                         — Eavan Boland, The Irish Times,

'Peter Sirr's first book is a joy to read . . . (He) has a technical prowess of extraordinary maturity . . . spectacularly gifted . . .'
                                                                                                                                                            — Thomas McCarthy, Poetry Ireland Review