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PETER SIRR
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From a glimpse of his pregnant wife and the ensuing epiphany, ‘we are walking slowly out of our old lives’, an extended sequence at the heart of Peter Sirr’s new collection conscribes the reality of new life and new joy, including an interlude in rural Ireland. ‘Here you are,’ he writes in ‘The Overgrown Path’, ‘disposed in light / and the company of trees / and here am I, applauding.’

The sureness of his poems’ footing interprets Dublin for a modern age. His preoccupation with language and the integrity of process endures and expands as he continues to translate past and recent experiences into coherent, convincing forms.

The book’s coda, ‘Carmina’, is an energetic rendering of the sexual shenanigans and invective of Catullus’s originals. Amplified by broad perspectives and keen intelligence, The Thing Is is the most personal and engaging of Peter Sirr’s seven collections.

Published: 24 September 2009

 

THE THING IS Cover: 'Bass Viol, Score Sheet and a Sword' (detail, oil on canvas, 1693) by Boyer (fl1670-99) Louvre © Bridgeman Art Library/Lauros/Giraudon

Reviews

. . . The Catullan renderings and evocations are one of the joys of The Thing Is . . . The recklessness of some of Catullus’s poems seems a guarantee of the perfect tuning of others. Similarly, the versions of Catullus (and Brecht) in Sirr’s volume offset and add resonance to the more important poems grouped in the sequences ‘Shhh’ and ‘The Overgrown Path’.

The ‘Shhh’ poems are poems of globalization, with titles such as The New Regime Inherits the Electrodes and For the Hanged Boys . These pieces help us to put names on some contemporary sources of confusion. An even finer achievement is the sequence entitled ‘The Overgrown Path’, concerning the poet’s expectant wife, childbirth, and the early childhood of their daughter:

           . . . I look over and see, suddenly, how close you are,
           what gravid means, how we are walking slowly out of
                our old lives . . .

In the title poem:

           The thing is this: you hold them to the light
           and laugh, you bring them to me
           one in each fist like the edges of a cross . . .

A little girl plays with crayons under the shadow of a cross: the reader is touched by a quattrocento gust. Then:

           . . . the joy of it lifts you to your feet
           where you sway with possibility, conducting your colours
           and the thing is this, the thing is always this.

That such a celebration of children and creativity occurs just as our birth-rate begins to top the European statistics is one of the ways in which Sirr, MacNeice-like, captures our current reality. Speaking as a Dubliner, I can testify that reading this labour of love I came both to know Dublin better and to like her better.
                   — Philip McDonagh, The Irish Times, 21 November 2009

Click on book for information
BRING EVERYTHING  MARGINAL ZONES  THE LEDGER OF FRUITFUL EXCHANGE  TALK, TALK  WAYS OF FALLING  SELECTED POEMS  SELECTED POEMS