Selected Poems | Peter Sirr

Peter Sirr is one of the bright stars of contemporary Irish poetry. His Selected Poems gathers poems from Marginal Zones (1984; winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award), Talk, Talk (1987), Ways of Falling (1991), The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange (1995; winner of the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry), and Bring Everything (2000). Sirr’s poetry eloquently reflects the changing realities of Dublin city, where personal, philosophical, and political concerns have formal implications, matching the geometry of the streets and architecture, as well as the shoreline of Dublin bay, which beckons the city’s inhabitants. His poems are sensually alert to the urban space around him and often brim over with luxuriant detail. Though Peter Sirr is always present to the world, sensitive to the language of the inarticulate, to the needs of love and desire, to what constitutes house and home, he is also consistently aware of what eludes us as we grasp experience, of what has no physical being.