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 concerns his 2012 collection, The Rooms.

 

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COR: In The Poetics of Space, a meditation on architecture and desire, Gaston Bachelard wonders whether, beyond “the memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter, above and beyond all the houses we have dreamed we lived in, can we isolate an intimate, concrete essence that would be a justification of the uncommon value of all of our images of protected intimacy?” How would you go about answering this question (or indeed, making sense of it)? I ask because, although youʼve mentioned him before, The Rooms seems to be very much in dialogue with Bachelardʼs work – saturated with a longing for home, a space at once particulate and ephemeral, half-dreamt and half-remembered, where the past may (just) be retrievable.

 

PS: This question was so interesting to me I ended up trying to answer it in a poem. This is it, given here since I really do owe it to your question:

 

Intimacies

 

All these landscapes, houses 

moving through us … 

this garden-lit room, this tree 

with its long branches

dangling like hair, 

looking in at the orangey light

that’s some kind of home, 

that seems to know 

more than it’s letting on…

 

these dreamed spaces we keep 

stumbling into, attics

of ache and memory, 

corridors spilling us 

to a whitened path, 

a bench waking to itself 

in the gathering dawn, 

that has been 

waiting for us…

 

or as if everything built 

has remembered

and what we move through 

is the one great shelter

drifting together

where, as soon as we enter,

we know everything 

has seen us before, whatever

we touch has already reached

right into the bone…

 

It’s true to say that Bachelard is in the mix in The Rooms, which is very much concerned with what home might mean, and how all those rooms, real, imagined, dreamt, relentlessly entered and patrolled, might form part of it. It would be hard to think of another writer who so intensely inhabits inner spaces and how they operate on the imagination. Childhood plays a large part in this since it is the child who is most aware and engaged with the spaces of home, and also because childhood, poetry, memory and solitude are all part of the same imaginative continuum. For a child the house is a dreamscape: “The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting place for daydreaming....” The book itself is a kind of poem; its mix of dense materiality and spiritual generosity reminds me of Francis Ponge, the great poet of things and “thingness”. We think of Irish writing as preoccupied with place with its tradition of dinnseanchas and the lore of placenames in Irish, but Bachelard offers us the lore of the micro-place, the primal shelter. He describes himself as “a psychologist of houses”, and I think the book helped me understand my own obsession with interior places, and with buildings and gardens both real and imagined. Some of it has to do with getting back to the perceptual state of the child. Childhood, Bachelard reminds us, “is certainly greater than reality…. It is on the plane of the daydreams and not that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us.” He also saw the lure of the house as a search for stability:

 

A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.

 

The Rooms goes back and forth through time in search of a body of images to answer to the need for that illusion of stability or soul, and of course the title sequence is obsessively concerned with it, with time and memory, and loss and grief, and the intersection with different places, one of which – Clooncunny – was a kind of attempt to re-enter a portion of my own past. The evocation of that specific place flows seamlessly into the childhood house in the country which in some senses I’ve never completely left.

 

COR: I think that in another life, you must have been a cartographer, albeit an eccentric one. The poems in this collection set out to salvage “the torn maps of the world, the held / breath of what was possible once”, while in ʽThe Mapmakerʼs Songʼ the titular craftsman designates himself “a geographer of breath // a curator of hands”, lying down in “the museum of the fingertip” to “touch, touch, touch” the treasures stored there. Similarly in Intimate City (2021), you trace and resurrect the footsteps of John Rocque, the Huguenot engraver and urban surveyor who published his map of Dublin in 1756. Whereas figures like Rocque have sought “the city fixed and framed”, you have a more expansive approach. How would you describe it?

 

PS: Eccentric is right. John Rocque, and other mapmakers, turn up in the prose book too so it’s safe to say that physical and psychical cartography are on my own peculiar menu of possibilities. Actual cartographers gather, interpret and process observable data and make their maps which are images of the real world, almost magical images in their absolute fidelity to an ideal of the real. I used to wander around the paper and digital versions of the Rocque map, fingering my way up and down the streets and alleys of 1756 Dublin. “Cut throat Lane, above a list of churches and directly above the engraved figure of the surveyor and his tripod, as if his view of the city might also be an inspection of its criminal underlife,” that essay begins. Murdering Lane. Cutpurse Row. Dirty Lane. Dunghill Lane. Bedlam. Black Dog Prison. He believed he had represented every single building in the city. The idea of cartography is very attractive for a poet, the idea of that kind of comprehensive aesthetic capture. And it’s linked with exploration and discovery, all those metaphors of the imagination deploying its own compasses and theodolites and hoping to capture something in the process.

 

COR: Are the poems that make up the title-series here sonnets? At a glance, they seem the right length – but they remain unrhymed, and relish their own loose-limbed nature, spilling into new shapes and patterns as needed. You often play with received notions of poetic form in your work.

 

PS: I suppose I might say, what exactly is a sonnet? I mean right now, for the likes of us. I think it’s a shape, a template, a framework we’re free to adapt however we like. What I was after was a series of short poems that built up some kind of pressure, that were tense little containers. And they follow the pattern of the sonnet in that they’re fourteen-liners and they’re both self-contained and also in conversation with all the other poems around them. I love forms, fixed and loose, I love the possibilities they offer, the reminder that poetry is a musical art. I’m led by the ear as I write, and I try to listen as carefully as I can to the tune of the poem. And I still write fourteen-line poems, still love that invitation to compactness and precision. Miroslav Holub said that poems were energy-storing and energy-releasing devices, and I suppose I see those short or shortish forms in that way.

 

COR: In ʽAudience with BBʼ (i.e. Bertolt Brecht), you describe a “world-stung trek to the desk”, the realisation forming that “Everything monstrous / has somehow survived”: there are “tyrants enough to keep you awake / and chain you to your desk / eternal gunfire ripping the dark.” Brecht hoped that later ages would avoid the cruelties of his own time. Poets today, however, continue to write in a world beset by barbarism (as your piece about the Syrian civil war, ʽHarmʼ, also suggests). Perhaps as a result – and feel free to correct me if Iʼm wrong – you seem more drawn to Brechtʼs poems of natural regeneration and amorous desire, and to the ironies and tensions that inhere in the role of the public poet, than to the historical diagnoses and calls-to-arms for which he was also famous. For all its wit and invention, I find the series somewhat sobering in this regard: in its recognition, for example, of the recurrence of atrocity through history, which the poet can acknowledge but not redress (“The poets calibrate the reach of elegy. / Obviously it is / a flawed technology.”). Whatʼs your response to this interpretation?

 

PS: I think of Donald Davie’s lines:

 

The practice of an art

is to convert all terms

into the terms of art.

By the end of the third stanza

death is a smell no longer;

it is a problem of style.

 

The poet raging against injustice has to be also the technician honing his or her art. For poets rage is only rage if it operates within the constraints of a fully formed poetic vision and art. Otherwise the poet’s voice has no more value than the butcher’s or the baker’s. Lots of poets or other artists are engaged in activism of one kind or another. The question is the extent to which it enters their work, or has to enter their work. Or the question is, if you like, what’s the job, in the end? For some it may be well be the political objective, the transformative diagnosis or call to arms, as you say, but I can’t pretend it’s like that for me. That would just be dishonest. But I’ve been convinced that the primary role of poetry is to be political in that primary sense which poets the objective or the politics first and the poetry after, as a kind of secondary structure just there to hold up the activist cry. It’s complicated, too, in that poets often make terrible politicians or political commentators and I don’t trust a poet’s opinions any more than a postman’s or a bus driver’s or a teacher’s. I suppose I even find the notion of the “public poet” inherently problematic. For me, the impulse doesn’t come from there, it arrives very differently and without preplanning or political forethought. Yet obviously poets live in the world and can’t be blind to it or pretend horror or justice don’t exist. It’s just the nature of the relationship between those and the imagination is not direct. And let’s not forget how much very bad, ill made and sentimental verse is out there trying to serve political needs. But nothing can be excluded either, we all live in the same world, and we can’t but be affected – emotionally, artistically, imaginatively – by what happens in it.

 

COR: In 2014, you also published a novel for young adults, Black Wreath – set in Dublin and colonial America in the 1730s, and following the turbulent fortunes of one James Lovett, teenaged son and heir of the violent, swindling Lord Dunmain. Is it purely a coincidence that Black Wreath and, on occasion, Intimate City both turn to eighteenth-century Dublin for inspiration, or is there something about that place and period that exerts a pull on your imagination? Were you working on Black Wreath and The Rooms at the same time? I imagine, in any case, that the novel required an adjustment in your writing routine.

 

PS: I was actually working on Black Wreath and Intimate City simultaneously. That Rocque map I mentioned above was one of the ways into the eighteenth century. I kept moving the characters around that map, and naming the streets, to such an extent the publisher lost patience and reminded me that a novel wasn’t a geography lesson. But it was also a period of great cultural, architectural richness, a developer’s city, a place of great possibilities for some and abject poverty for many. Who knows what it might have become had the Act of Union not drained the life out of it? I found the bones of the story in Maurice Craig’s book about Dublin. It was a huge scandal of the time and resulted in one of the longest running trials of the age, when the nephew escaped his servitude and returned to sue his uncle. I enjoyed writing it, and of course I also enjoyed the wandering and writing involved in Intimate City. Poetry is a quick art; you don’t sit around all day doing it. Prose is more deliberate and measured but I find the two exist pretty easily together.