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 2009 collection, The Thing Is.
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COR: For me, one of the pleasures of this collection is its portrayal of life as a “history of small journeys”. You document the arrival and early years of your daughter, Freya: “Dear pea-head, in your lunar language / tell us again how the world stirs, / how things appear, hold still, drift”. You also juxtapose the hushed excitement of caring for a new baby with the totalizing procedures of the nation-state, which knows how to classify, but not how to rejoice – or how to love. “Welcome 3755547K / your small head rests / in the arms of the state”, begins ʽPPSʼ: “your cries / have found their way / to a vault of need”. Out of curiosity, what does 3755547K, now of voting age, make of these poems?
PS: The poems you write are going to reflect the life you live. And the birth of a child is a pretty seismic event. It shakes up your life in ways you could never have imagined. So Enda and I were transformed by that experience, and still are, of course. One of the things that happens, as any parent will know, is that it changes your perception of who you are and what you’re for. Your sense of self is recalibrated to accommodate the strange and wonderful creature who has appeared in your life and who needs your urgent attention. Her entry into the world, her perception of her surroundings, her constant learning and adapting become yours too; part of you becomes your child. And there’s great joy and surprise in that, even as there’s also increased fear and anxiety. All of that ends up in what you write, or at least in certainly did in mine and Enda’s case. The poems in ‘The Overgrown Path’ chart all that. Poems of celebration and anxiety, about language, the newness of the world, about being in the country as well as the city. Poems that try to be as attentive to the moment as possible. 3755547K (not quite her PPS number!) tolerates the poems but she’s long past the point where she has to endure poetry readings by her parents and doesn’t spend her time reading her parents’ books. Very sensible.
COR: The wonderful ʽCarminaʼ that round out this collection are based on the work of Catullus, a poet youʼve described, memorably, as “a kind of psycho Banksy daubing filth on the walls of Rome”. Here, you chase his raucous ghost through “the buried streets / and fallen hills” of a metropolis caught mid-way between vibrancy and collapse. He emerges as a figure both incontrovertible and elusive: “blink once”, he cries, “and a galaxy is gone / the gods have lived and died.” The vulnerability of lives, of poems, to erasure and effacement – this is something of a motif of yours (even as the very act of writing arguably keeps the flame alive, and brightly burning, a little longer). What drew you to Catullus specifically?
PS: I’ve always been interested in Catullus and as you mention I’ve returned to him again recently and written a long essay about him and translated some of the poems again. He’s a poet you don’t seem to get over. You might think, here’s this young Roman poet writing very much in the temper of his times, quite violent seeming and full of all sorts of posturing, that it would be the kind of work that would exhaust its appeal and be outgrown with age. “Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?”, and all that. But I find the opposite, that if you catch the C-bug it never leaves you: the voice, the risk, the adventure, the playfulness and self-awareness. The poems in ‘Carmina’ started off as an attempt to write a play, and then it morphed onto the series of versions that’s in the book. I wanted the set to be reflective of the particular moment it was written in, Celtic Tiger Ireland, so it’s as if Catullus has gone to sleep and woken up in Dublin:
coming to
in the swaying tram
still at it, still here
thicktongued with want
and rubbing your finger
on the misted window to see
the brutal, lovely
persistence of the city.
So I suppose I was conscripting Catullus for my own purposes, but I think any kind of translatorly intervention does that. It’s always a relationship with yourself as well as the author whose voice you’re hijacking. And I wanted to get some of the energy, passion, ferocity of the work into my own versions.
COR: In the same series, you allude to the fact that there are innumerable Catulluses to choose from: his poems have been translated over and over, but never entirely in the same way. As you’ve said elsewhere, “there’s this strange temporal trick whereby he always seems to be our contemporary, as if he’s immune to time”. In ʽCarminaʼ , you make reference to Louis and Celia Zukofsky, who produced a homophonic rendering of his work in the 1960s (“Another winter closes in. / Zukofsky and Celia at the table again”). An unfair question, but are there any other versions you have a fondness for? I know Michael Hartnett had a suite of translations. Likewsie, Anne Carson, the Canadian writer, produced Nox, an engagement with poem 101, Catullusʼs elegy for his brother.
PS: I admire many translations of Catullus, and there are a huge amount to choose from, from the scholarly to the more playful and contemporising. I worked a lot from the old Loeb bilingual edition with prose translations, but for me the pre-eminent current scholarly translations are Peter Green’s. There’s nobody more knowledgeable, and his introductory essay and notes are brilliant, as are the translations themselves. James Michie’s versions are enjoyable and sprightly and have endured well; I’ve been reading them for years and still go back to them. I also like Josephine Balmer, and more recently Isobel Williams’ Switch, which mixes the translations with the translator’s own illustrations of Shibari rope bondage. I admire Nox too, which is a different kind of enterprise, but anything that Anne Carson writes is worth reading and her Greek translations are always provocative and interesting too. I’m a big fan of Michael Hartnett but I have to admit I haven’t paid proper attention to the Catullus versions.
COR: Alongside Freya, the co-dedicatee of this collection is your wife (and my aunt), Enda Wyley, whom youʼve mentioned in previous exchanges. I can remember visiting your shared home in Clooncunny, Roscommon, in the late 2000s, and thinking I’d entered not only a haven away from Dublin, but the very house of verse: it seemed as if there were poems nestling everywhere, from the nook of the babyʼs crib to “the hedges webbed with dew” in the lane (Endaʼs book, To Wake to This, was published in the same year.) I tend to think of writing as a solitary kind of activity and pursuit, so I wonder: what is it like to have two poets living under one roof? Did Clooncunny change the texture of your work, do you think, or add anything new to the creative mix?
PS: That cottage and the land around it was a kind of magical place. In the end we weren’t able to keep it for very long but we tried to make it a kind of writerly haven. It was also a return in part for me to the kind of landscapes I’d loved as a child and teenager. I spent all my summers with the sister closest to me in age on a farm in Co. Galway near the Roscommon border and not more than half an hour’s drive from Clooncunny. I’m often thought of as a city poet but that’s not the full story, as it probably never is for most Irish people. My father grew up on a farm; my grandmother was a teacher and her husband, my namesake, was a founding member of Clann na Talmhan, the small farmers party which won 10 ten seats in the 1943 general election. So there’s a lot of country in my blood and a lot of strong memories of the physical realities of farmhouse and farm, animals and fields, filling buckets from a stream, all the smells and noises, days spent on the bog. Seamus Sirr, the bog poet… Maybe not exactly, but you’ll know what I mean, with your own Leitrim connections. In truth, the Clooncunny idyll was an urban pipe dream, an urban fantasy of country life. But it was a useful and productive fantasy too and it very much informs the poems in The Thing Is and The Rooms. Maybe it’s an Irish thing, but place is a very powerful trigger for Irish poets, an enormous enabler; we’re imaginatively wedded to a kind of dinnseanchas. I don’t necessarily, or only, mean this as a responsiveness to nature, although that certainly forms part of it. But a sensitivity to the multiple elsewheres that sneak into an imaginative life…
COR: It was around this time that you were invited to write an introduction to the audio boxset of Seamus Heaneyʼs Collected Poems, produced by RTÉ with funding from The Lannan Foundation. In the essay that resulted, you say that “Heaney is like a still life artist who needs to arrange the loved and familiar world so that it can shine back its power”, guiding readers to a place where “the ordinary and the mysterious” intersect. I take it you admire his work? What are your memories of him?
PS: That essay is probably the primary articulation of the admiration you mention. I admire a lot of things about Heaney: the craft, the sensuousness and precision of the language, the seriousness of the ambition which is reflected also in the critical work and the translations. He was one of the first real poets I encountered. I remember buying North in Alan Hanna’s bookshop as a teenager and I remember being at the launch of Field Work in the Edmund Burke Theatre in Trinity, the sense of real occasion, and hearing him read ‘Casualty’ for the first time. I knew him a little, I wouldn’t say well, and I interviewed him publicly once at the Franco-Irish literary festival in Dublin. Heaney and Robert Lowell were among the first poets I read seriously, though obviously that list expanded quickly. Heaney was certainly an influence in terms of attention to craft and discipline, and that keen and generous intelligence, even if I felt closer to other poets whose lives and subject matter I had more in common with. But Heaney’s power is enduring; I’ve recently been teaching him and seeing how much he appeals to young readers, not least because of his artistic independence and the kind of moral complexity you discuss eloquently in your review of the letters. That sense of him being his own man, responding to the work on his own terms, and refusing to be the mouthpiece of others.