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 1984 collection, Marginal Zones.

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COR: I wonder if you could offer us a brief sketch of the young poet who – forty years ago now – wrote this book, presumably while still a student. In moments a formality enters into the performance, but there’s also a real excitement at play. Itʼs clear that you were something of a linguist and literary explorer, for example – casting the work of Dante and Tasso in a new light. You had also hit on a discovery of sorts: that “everything here depends // On our having no way of expressing it” (as you put it in ʻTranslationsʼ). These themes resurface in later poems.

PS: I worked on a lot of those poems when I was in Trinity. I was doing a degree in English and Irish but I spent a lot of time haunting the stacks of Italian and French, greedily consuming poetry. I started learning Italian when I was there and that’s continued since, and I ended up living there later. But I was interested in poetry in translation from other languages too, Lorca, Machado, Jimenez, Germans, Russians and so on, the Penguin Modern European series. And I still am – poetry is a vast transnational ocean, and I was as keen then as I am now to converse with as many poets and poems as I could. I was very happy in the Lecky Library, which was where the Arts were housed then, except when I had to work on English essays. You’re right about the formality. I was very interested in the formal traditions of American poetry, whether it was Stevens or Crowe Ransom or Crane or Lowell and Bishop, also people like Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht or Richard Wilbur. But also Donne or Traherne or a dozen others, I was drinking it all up and writing poems that I can see now were pretty derivative but which I needed to write at the time. 

And I was in a state of excitement about it all. I was involved in setting up a poetry workshop in Trinity where a bunch of us meet weekly and pummelled each other’s efforts, I was getting things published in the likes of The Irish Press or Icarus. And it was clear that poetry was really the only thing I was interested in. I stayed on to do an M.Litt. on the poetry of Padraic Fallon, a still woefully neglected poet, but I was essentially buying time to work on poems. I think even though early work can be all over the place and heavily indebted to whatever you’re reading, you do often hit on a version of the themes and material that will recur later. I think most writers are obsessive anyway and have a small enough palette of preoccupations, so some of mine certainly announced themselves early. I had a lot of unfocused emotions then, there were a good few unhappy circumstances and poetry was to an extent a refuge, or a place where I could let off emotional and imaginative steam. But I was greatly excited by all the possibilities, and possessed by the notion that it might be possible to write poems, that this might be the central preoccupation. And I’d been in that state really since my late teens, when the drug started to take hold. 

COR: Is there a subversive charge to the impulse to attend to areas of experience traditionally considered “marginal” or unworthy of notice? And is there something about poetry in particular that lends itself to those attentions? In ʻThe King in the Forestʼ, a lord of “battlement and parapet”, finds that a different code reigns among the “Leaf-tides and birdsong” of the woods where he walks; he comes to see himself as “Prince of nothing, antic inheritor / Of everything ungovernable”. The kingʼs sense of hierarchy and dominion is tested by the vibrant, unruly “zone” of the forest: a shift in perspective and change of habitat the poem records in revelatory terms.

PS: There’s something of Nerval in that poem, who was an obsession at the time, ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’, but I suppose one of the ambitions of all poetry is to attend to what or who gets overlooked. Lazarus living his weirdly miraculous life in the margins, the wife or lover of a prophet, a castaway with Ulysses for company, the sense of Irish as a threatened and neglected language – I was interested in all kinds of marginal states or conditions. And that first poem you mention, ‘The King in the Forest’, it was the idea of being “the startled interloper set down / In a corner of the canvas”, and then witnessing some kind of vision that fuels the poem. 

COR: Was Derek Mahon an influence, at this time? ʻThe Collectorʼs Marginaliaʼ imagines the travails of a linguist attempting to preserve a language that survives between the cracks and crags of a West-of-Ireland landscape, only to “wonder why Iʼm here, making coffins / for words.” “On windy days”, the poem reads, “I stay inside and watch // A lone tree grow sideways like something dreamed / Or the idea of a tree”. Iʼm reminded of Mahonʼs ʻOvid in Tomisʼ or ʻA Garage in County Corkʼ, among others – poems fascinated by the recalcitrance of life itself, its sites and processes, over and against the designs and appropriations of the literary artist (or that stand-in, the scholarly expert decamped from the metropole).

PS: Derek Mahon was certainly an influence, as were Heaney, Longley and many American poets. In Mahon’s case it was the urbanity, wit and to me astonishing control of language that resonated particularly. ‘The Collector’s Marginalia’ probably owes something of its tone to Mahon, but it comes too out of my own studies of Irish and time spent in Connemara, and being as you say the whippersnapper decamped from the metropolis. I had a lot of contrary pulls going on: city/country, Irish/English, scholarship/poetry and I was still finding my feet in paths laid by others. I think it really only when I left Ireland that I was able to find a path of my own.

COR: Looking back at it now, what do you make of ʻBeached Whaleʼ? Itʼs one of my favourite poems from this early collection. I love its deep imagery and fluent unfolding, line by line – “You went down like the sun / And dawn tumbled on the sand / Your grey, gigantic death” – but also that it complicates the reputation critics have fashioned for you over the years. Youʼre not generally viewed as a pelagic poet, despite the evidence of this piece, or indeed the similarly themed ʻWhalefallʼ, from The Rooms (2014).

PS: Yes, two whale poems in forty years is pretty poor pelagic form. ‘Beached Whale’ is a very early poem, written as a response to a newspaper image of a beached whale. It came quickly but I still kind of like it. Like many poets, I suspect, I very rarely read old poems, and I pretty much never revisit the early books, but that poem was among the first I wrote that I felt worked in some way and made me feel I might be able to do something. ‘Whalefall’ likewise stemmed from a factual account, but I was gripped by the idea that the carcass of a whale could be a habitable zone for generations of creatures gradually stripping it down to the marrow, the idea that “the whale pulse”, the ongoing pulse of life, could be sustained in exactly the way that the force of life survives our own mortality. 

COR: Marginal Zones was published by The Gallery Press, still your publisher today. Can you recall what the process of compiling the manuscript was like? You had won the Patrick Kavanagh Award a year previously, so perhaps the general shape of the collection was already clear in your mind. 

PS: I was twenty-two when I won the Kavanagh Award, and one of the judges was Peter Fallon. He asked me to send him new work over the next while and that’s what I did, and then one day he simply said, ‘I think we have a book.’ And that was it, and the book came out a couple of months after that letter, in 1984. I never looked anywhere else and was very happy to be published by Gallery, whose books I’d long admired: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Pearse Hutchinson, Michael Hartnett, John Ennis, Nuala Archer.... I suppose I always work pretty instinctively, moving from poem to poem rather than mapping out a book. At the same time, the poems end up speaking to each other and connecting with each other in ways you might not consciously plan or recognise. So there were a lot of poems about various kinds of marginal states, voices from the edge. But it’s also very much a first book, with all the imperfections that implies. There was a lot of experience that didn’t get into the poems – it took a while to learn to trust my own experience a bit more.