Between February 2024 and March 2025, the poet Peter Sirr (PS) and I (COR) engaged in a series of written interviews about Peter’s work. The conversation below is centred on his 2000 collection, Bring Everything.
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COR: Iʼd like to begin with a line from ʽGospelsʼ: “my voice is a city / sunk in sand I would // raise it again”. At a glance, this may seem like a rather Joycean formulation, perhaps even a reference to what the author of Dubliners and Ulysses attempted and achieved (Finnegans Wake could also be thought of as an elaborate attempt, at a linguistic level, to “bring everything”). Thomas Kinsella also comes to mind – patrolling the peripheries of the citadel and seeing into the core. Do you feel a kinship with either of these writers? You cast a cold eye on the appropriation of Joyce for commercial ends in ʽJames Joyce Homeloansʼ, but you still share common ground with him.
PS: I don’t think either Joyce or Kinsella are in the background here. I admire both, obviously, and their imaginative focus on the city of Dublin has to be enabling for any subsequent writer, but at the same time there comes a point when you are writing from your own impulses and obsessions and according to your own lights. Your writing is determined by those and by the kind of shaping personality you bring to your subjects and forms. Who you are, as opposed to anybody else, becomes the point from which the poems flow. We can only ever say what’s in our range and ability to say, we end up having our own peculiar signature, the thing – which it can be tricky to put a finger on – that makes our work identifiable, that marks it out from what others are doing or have done.
‘Gospels’ came out of an interest in and preoccupation with the religious impulse, the hermetic impulse, the desire to abandon the world and seek a perfect communion with a deity or some kind of spiritual essence. And I was thinking of Jesus’ injunction to the men who were to become his apostles to leave their work, their wives, their ordinary lives, and join his urgent enterprise. I was interested in what it’s like to leave everything, to retreat into emptiness and silence, to be a prophet on a pillar, especially since the pull of the world, of the everyday, the bustle, the noise, the network of attachments, is so magnetically powerful. And I suppose I wanted some sense of a religion or spirituality that didn’t seek abandonment but revelled in the world, so the poem’s progression is from that imperious injunction of “Leave everything” to the more humane one of “Bring everything”:
He came among us and said much
Bring everything
I remember
the shirt on your back, and all the others
your lovers, children, beasts
your cheque stubs, phone bills
and the junk stored in the yard…
COR: Part of the reason I asked the question above is that your chosen literary forebears in this book are not from Ireland at all. The writers you pay tribute to include Günter Kunert, Fernando Pessoa, Giacomo Leopardi, and the Middle Tang-era poet, Po Chü-i – whom you picture queueing for fish and chips on Werburgh Street, “the hot package” carefully “unswaddled, / salted, drenched, wrapped again / and borne out into the darkness”. What a feast! Your work is notably hospitable to world-poets and the stories they tell. This openness, where does it stem from? Might there be a latent lesson here again: that the sources of poetry (including your poetry) are by nature manifold?
PS: I don’t think of them as “chosen literary forebears” but you’re completely right to mention those poets. They’ve all meant a lot in their different ways though their appearance, or my interaction with them on my part, doesn’t come out of any systematic study or planning. I read a lot of poetry and I read as widely as I can and across as many different cultures as I can. I think that’s important. Ireland is a small place, Irish poetry is a tiny place, so you have to lift your head above the parapet. You have to keep educating yourself. I don’t think I’m in any way unique in that: poets are usually pretty internationally minded, with strong magpie-streaks that let them range widely. I know what you mean by “world-poets”, though I’d dispute the term, as I would “world-music”, as it posits our own culture as some kind of centre with a big alien other outside. We’re part of that world-poetry ourselves; there are no centres of peripheries, just a stream of interconnected traditions washing across each other.
Sometimes I have fun localising or domesticating a poet from a long time ago and a large geographical or geopolitical distance, bringing Po Chü-i into Burdock’s or having Catullus prowl the contemporary streets of Dublin. But it’s also part of a feeling of deep connection with their work, in the same way, for different reasons, I feel close to someone like Pessoa. You feel a kind of sensibility connection, I suppose. Your experience and circumstances may be totally different, but you form a connection with the driving spirit of their work, or with a line or rhythm, or a way of being in the world that gets under your skin. It works at a very instinctive level, although I suppose your instincts are to an extent preordained by the peculiar print of your own personality.
COR: Youʼve remarked when speaking about this collection in the past that although you “dislike all organised religions” you are “interested in the religious impulse” – an impulse visible in ʽGospelsʼ, entering the slipstream of the city and uncovering a space where “our lives are packed with endless purpose”. In ʽPeter Streetʼ, you write that you would “almost pray some ache remain” of the hospital, now metamorphosed into a “building site”, where your father once lay ill. Could you unpack that “almost” for me? Iʼm curious to know how close a poem comes to prayer, or how porous the boundary may be between “the religious impulse” and the poetic.
PS: I wouldn’t want to impose any fake or diluted Christianity on anyone, but I’ve often felt that poetry comes close to a kind of prayer. Not in a religious sense – but then I don’t believe religion has a monopoly on prayer. It doesn’t have to involve intercession or supplication to a deity; it can be a personal invocation, a summoning of your own impulses and desires and hopes, or an acknowledgement of longing or a recognition of some kind of grace. I’ve just written a series of micro-psalms based on the Biblical originals but shifted out of that specific religious context because even as an atheist I felt deeply attuned to that extraordinary voice, the range of it, the passion, rage and love that all inhabit it simultaneously. I’ve always been an interested reader of religious texts and I suppose I’ve never quite shaken off the vestiges of a cultural Christianity. I was very religious as a child and I’m still in touch with those feelings, that atmosphere. Maybe it takes a couple of generations to get conventional religion out of the system, I don’t know. But I think of those lines by Stanley Moss, a poet who doesn’t believe in God but keeps writing about him:
The man who never prays
accepts that the wheat field in summer
kneels in prayer when the wind blows across it...
(‘Blanket’)
That “almost pray” you pick up on very astutely is located on that porous boundary, as is the whole poem, which summons the spirit of my dead father. The notion that you’d want an apartment building to retain a sense of the pain of the hospital is not very rational or even humane, but it’s part of that wish for some kind of ongoing connection with someone who is not here anymore. Poetry is very often in conversation with the past and the dead, and the whole notion of elegy depends on it. Who are elegies for, after all? They’re perfect examples of poems as prayers – unreasonable gestures the imagination demands and the poet reaches for to get beyond the limit of ordinary perception or experience.
COR: In our last exchange you mentioned your prose book, Intimate City (2021), the title of which, I think, originates in a poem from this collection, ʽThe Huntʼ: “We drifted through the intimate city / like dust, like light / settling briefly, silent but alert / looking for an opening”. With its essayistic excursions and mixing of memoir and social portraiture, Intimate City explores the streetscapes and deep past of a number of urban milieux, including Dublin. In hindsight, Bring Everything arguably pursues similar concerns, offering a living archaeology, or an imaginative geographical account, of the “solid city” that “roots in the bone”, as you trail among cobbles and cathedrals, on the scent of those “gods / of the infinite city // promising to return.” Is this an anachronistic comparison, or is there something to it?
PS: Both books come from the same place and are fed by the same sources: a preoccupation with history, a sense of the multiple layers of an old city, that you’re literally walking on top of the past and its lives. Archaeology and occupation meet too in the literal search for somewhere to live in a city where that’s always difficult. ‘The Hunt’ is about that competitive experience but also that feeling of constantly being interrupted or ambushed by history in, say, Stoneybatter or Kilmainham, the beggar Skaldbrother, the city’s pig killer, who turns up in Intimate City, and coming back with the “dust of centuries in our hair//old coins in our pockets.” The city plays a big part in Bring Everything, especially the historic centre city which is where I was living then (I’m only down the road now, just south of the Liberties). It’s there in the likes of ‘Sráid na gCaorach’, ‘The Hunt’, ‘Madly Singing in the City’, ‘Habitat’, ‘The Stone Door’, ‘Peter Street’, ‘The Domes of the City’. And some, like ‘Essex Street’, are directly inspired by archaeological digs and glimpses of the distant past. At the same time I’ve never made into an explicit project, or set out to be a “Dublin poet”. Dublin happens to be the city I know, that I grew up in, so it’s that, rather than any folkloric Dublinness, that interests me.
COR: Perhaps you could say a few words about how Intimate City later took shape. What prompted the turn to prose, for instance? Were you drawing on the example of particular authors when you were writing, or just following your own flow? Walter Benjaminʼs Arcades Project suggests itself as a possible precursor, although in general I find your writing more phenomenological and memoir-oriented than his; for all its quirks, Arcades Project remains grounded in a broadly Marxist tradition of reflection and inquiry. I also thought of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, who argues that a healthy urban ecosystem will arise from – and must allow for – a combination of spontaneity and community, values that your own work implicitly affirms.
PS: I’ve always envied prose writers. I’m mostly a poet but I’m sometimes driven to commit acts of prose, and am in the throes of something at the moment. I think the attraction of prose for a poet is the dailiness of it, the solid labour, the Victorian industriousness, the Elon Musk, non-stop, Puritan relentlessness of it. Poetry is not that, poetry for me comes in two waves, the long or short gestation, the silent dream, looking out the window, listening to music period, letting the tension build up, waiting for the head and gut and heart to do their alchemy, and then the sudden burst period when you actually commit whatever is inside to paper, when the poem write is ready to write you.
Intimate City began with a desire to engage more consciously with the city. To explore it physically – I’ve always walked endlessly around the city but I wanted to do it more consciously, to think about where I was, to take notes and photographs. And that led to exploring libraries, reading a lot of history, getting a sense of the city at the various stages of its development. At the same time, it was never meant to be a scholarly work and even at its most densely historical I was trying for a more personal approach. I was very interested in the Arcades Project, so that was certainly there, as were writers like Jacques Réda, whose The Ruins of Paris was inspirational, as well as that American urbanist tradition you mention. I was also aware of Dublin as a much written about city so I was keen to seek out new ground, new angles. If I was writing it now it would be a different kind of book, with more focus on how cruel a city it has become for anyone trying to make a life there. My focus, apart from the essays on the Docklands, was more on the past, distant and recent, old routes, old maps, literary ghosts, but it also poses the question of what a living city should look like.
I researched and wrote the book over several years and then simply left the material to one side as I couldn’t think what to do with it. Publication came about by chance. My wife Enda mentioned to Maurice Earls that I had all these essays and he expressed interest in seeing them, and so they were published in the Dublin Review of Books, which is where Peter Fallon saw them and liked them enough to publish the book. A book which has probably sold more than all my poetry books put together, which I find interesting. It was as if I had written a “real” book at last. People still come up to me and comment on it, which of course you would never get as a poet. I’m not sure what the moral is there.