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 1987 collection, Talk, Talk.
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COR: By 1987, you were a co-editor (with Michael Cronin and Barra Ó Seaghdha) of Graph magazine, a publication founded, you later wrote, in response to a national situation defined by “record unemployment, high emigration, widespread political self-censorship in the media, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland, and mounting despair about a society whose ambitions and perspectives were dispiritingly narrow”. This is a grim vista, and the aim of Graph was correspondingly combative: to break free “from the toxic cultures of fear that make dissent unimaginable and vision impossible”. Is there a need for this kind of publication today, or has the atmosphere changed sufficiently since the 1980s? Can you tell us more about the political and cultural assumptions you were dissenting from, and indeed about the alternative vision of the magazine?
PS: Graph was launched in 1986, which was a pretty bleak time. I left Ireland the same year and spent six years away so the heavy lifting of that first series was borne by the other editors while I contributed from afar. It was, as you suggest, a challenging time – high unemployment, political stasis, ongoing violence in the North, a culture of conservatism, the Eighth Amendment, the rejection of divorce, and so forth. But also a pretty insular culture, we felt. So we wanted to put something out there that engaged with both Irish and international literature and thinking, that would be a lively commentary on arts and culture, that could house writing about John Banville or Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill but also Italo Calvino or Yves Bonnefoy (the subject of a fascinating two-part interview with Michael O’Loughlin) or Spanish or German poetry. The palette was very broad but the point was to give space to readable and engaged writing. We wanted something that had a different vision of the possibilities of the country than RTÉ or The Irish Times and what we felt was an imprisoning consensus culture.
Ireland is clearly in some respects a very different kind of place today and it’s hard to imagine a magazine like Graph thriving now. Not that it exactly throve at the time and it has been effectively written out of the record since. There are very good literary journals, but Graph was a kind of rough-and-ready oppositional samizdat, pasted together late at night and rushed in the early morning to reprint at the back of Trinity. It had an edge that was maybe of its time.
But for all its new wealth Ireland is still a difficult place for younger generations of writers and artists, frozen out by high rents, the relentless focus on material wealth, and still dominated by a consensus culture focused on money. It’s an infinitely richer and more diverse place, but also a deeply confused one prey to all kinds of hostile and unwelcome influences.
COR: Talk, Talk contains love poems a-plenty, and the same can be said of your subsequent collections. ʻPostscriptʼ reads: “I open your palm like a letter / in which little is risked”, the gesture “dithering without a word / above the impulsive flourish of our lives.” Thereʼs a pattern throughout the collection, whereby the slightly surreal experience of being immersed in a relationship with someone comes to mirror the process of learning how to live in a new place, a new language, suddenly at home in your own foreignness there. One poet who was exploring a somewhat similar tone and terrain (in poetry) at around this time was Michael Hofmann. Was he on your radar then, or since?
PS: Most of Talk, Talk was written in Holland, where I’d gone to live in early 1986. I started off in Amsterdam, and then moved to Bussum and finally Hilversum. My girlfriend was Dutch, based in Groningen in the north, so I spent a fair bit of time travelling up and down the country. I was teaching in the English-language section of a large Dutch school in Hilversum. I spent the guts of four years in Holland before moving to Italy and it was the first place I’d lived outside Ireland. I found it exhilarating, enervating, fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Holland is obviously not far from Ireland but for me it was like being on another planet. Centuries of mercantile democracy and self-assuredness had something to do with it. Orderliness. A social coolness and inscrutability, a blunt directness I chafed against as a devious self-concealing, indirect Irishman. But I loved the civic fabric, the buildings and canals, the care taken over everything, I loved living in Amsterdam. I was in the Indische Buurt in East Amsterdam, named after the colonial adventures in Indonesia – Borneostraat, Molukkenstraat, Javastraat, where I lived, an area full of colour, of immigrants and markets. It was everything I thought a city should be, especially after the urban desolation of 1980s Dublin.
We still don’t understand cities, we can’t work public transport, we don’t seem to be able to understand that you need to have people living in the centre of cities for them to thrive. Our politicians don’t live in cities or care about them. But Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Groningen were all marvellous places to me. I was trying to find my way around, and learn the language. My girlfriend’s family lived in the east, in a small town and in Overijssel and didn’t speak much English, which was a great incentive for me to learn Dutch. And I got to like the language and became interested in some of the many interesting poets. So it was all new and exotic, and of course being in a foreign country was related to the emotional life of the relationship, that kind of discovery. The poems reflected those discoveries, they were attempting to map the experiences. Being at home in your own foreignness, as you put it, is a good way to describe it. It’s no bad thing for a writer to try to get to know another culture, another way of inhabiting the world, even if you’re always going to be on the outside looking in.
I don’t think I became aware of Michael Hofmann until much later, and I was more interested in his criticism at first. But I admire his poetry, too, if somewhat distantly, only because I’ve never immersed myself in it the way I have with other poets. I interviewed him a few years ago in Books Upstairs and greatly enjoyed meeting him. And I admire his translations from German a lot.
COR: ʻLe città invisibileʼ likewise takes the form of a journeying love-letter, persisted in until “Iʼve finally persuaded you / this visible cityʼs here to stay.” Its title references Italo Calvinoʼs Invisible Cities, a novel in which Marco Polo regales Kublai Khan with vivid descriptions of the exotic cities heʼs encountered on his travels, each of which turns out to be a version of Venice, his home. For Calvino, cities arenʼt just trade hubs or bastions of power; theyʼre part of the imaginative geography of our lives: we carry them around with us and re-create them in our minds. Was Calvino an important figure for you?
PS: Calvino has always been an important figure. I loved, and still love, large stretches of his work but the standout book is Le città invisibile. Maybe because his parents were scientists, he had a kind of forensic exactitude that made even the most fantastic creations work like precision instruments. Think of those early fables where he began to find himself as a writer, pushing beyond the limits of the realism he had begun with: the viscount cloven in two so that two different versions of himself return from the war; the baron who takes to the trees and discovers a Utopian philosophy; the non-existent knight pulling up his visor to demonstrate his nothingness to Charlemagne. Invisible Cities is as much a collection of poems as a novel, but it began as a project to write a script on Marco Polo. He says in his letters that he had to read Marco Polo’s travels over and over “in order to absorb the visionary charge that is the book’s secret.” That’s seem like a pretty poetic way of thinking, if anything is.
COR: The closing section of the book is filled with memories and re-imaginings of your father. ʻVigilsʼ portrays you and him together, “held forever / in the white light of a difficult room”, where he lies dying. Although lyrical and often tender, thereʼs also a rawness and intensity to these pieces and the emotions they harbour. I wonder if you see things in these poems now that you may not have noticed or been aware of before. You dedicated Talk, Talk to the memory of your father, and Marginal Zones to both of your parents: maybe you could say a few words about them here. Unsurprisingly, childhood memories have a strong potency in your work.
PS: My father was barely fifty when he died, and he’d been sick since he was forty. His lingering illness and death were the defining events of our lives. It was a progressive neurological disease that attacked one faculty after another – moving, eating, swallowing, speaking, so it was very distressing for him and for us, for my sisters and my mother. I don’t think my mother ever really got over it. So that shadow inevitably hangs over a lot of the earlier work, and it’s something I’ve returned to constantly. I hadn’t gone back to those poems until your question – I tend only to be interested in what I’m writing at the moment. And I found them difficult to read because they brought back the pain of that final period in the hospital where my father was trying to communicate with his shaky hand hovering over the letters of the alphabet on a card. The poems – and actually that applies to the love poems, too – are all about the effort to communicate, are themselves acts of frustrated communication. And then they become elegies, or poems confronting the death and trying to deal with it. The poem that gives its title to the book is very much in that psychic space, trying to heal the pain of loss but ultimately failing, realising the limits of language as well as my own human limitations:
Why am I always trying
to make you say things?
As if all our life had been
this one conversation hovering
over a broken microphone ...
I have fallen back on notes
that thin out as I read,
I had drink too much to listen
or I have forgotten.
I have thrown
everything to the wind but caution.
When I look back now, I can see there was a lot of bleakness, and I can see how we were all shaped by that. Happiness seemed to be pretty elusive, or something that belonged to other people. I realise that for years I lived with very low expectations of everything, with a kind of fatalism and I suppose you never really shake off your early experiences as much as you might like to. And then it all gets bound up with the impulses that make you want to write, and it tends to be there at some level underlying everything. Yet of course that’s only part of the picture. We’re not totally prisoners of our lives, or we’d never get anything done. And there are so many other stimuli and triggers – a vast world out there as well as imaginative worlds you relate to.
I realise I’m probably not answering your question – my parents were clearly more than the sum of the afflictions they endured, but in a way their lives are opaque to me, or clouded by difficult memories that are hard to reach beyond. And I never managed to achieve a real closeness to them, which I’m sure says as much about me as about them. It’s a hard thing to say, I wish we’d understood each other better or been able to talk to each more. They were products of an emotionally distant Ireland, boarding schools, dysfunction of one kind or another, reticence. Their lives were tough in ways that I only fully appreciate now, it wasn’t easy for them to relate to me wanting to study literature or write poetry, but really they had more pressing issues to worry about. And yet I learnt a huge amount from them, too. From how they coped with the huge burdens they had to deal with. From their humour, my mother especially had a sharp, satirical tongue. But also practical, everyday kinds of things. My mother was a teacher and I learned a lot of Irish from her, both were from the West of Ireland, and I spent all my summers on my father’s mother’s farm, where his sister and her husband also lived, and that link with the rural west is something I’m very grateful for.