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 1991 collection, Ways of Falling.
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COR: We catch a glimpse of a more open style of writing in this book, which later becomes a feature of your work. Iʼm thinking of poetic sequences like ʻHere and There: A Notebookʼ and ʻDeath of a Travel Writerʼ, which trail across multiple pages, and are divided into discrete parts that nevertheless echo and extend each other as they progress. The desire to open up the lyric poem, widening its parameters and horizons – can you recall how this urge developed, or what inspired it? I used the word “sequences”, but how would you describe these pieces?
PS: I’m wary of the word “sequence” because I think what I do is a bit different: I think of poems like that as loosely related series, poems with constituent parts that talk to each other and that don’t progress sequentially, with a defined beginning, middle and end. But it’s certainly true that I was going after something a bit more open, a bit less defined, and in that sense Ways of Falling is a transitional book. Most of the poems were written in Holland and Italy, and my experiences in those countries very much fed into them. There’s something slightly fraught about them, and maybe about the book as a whole. Those were crowded years in many respects, with a lot of stuff going on, a lot of moving from one place to another and dealing with tricky jobs. There’s a poem called ‘Dinner at the Residence Hotel’, which tries to express some of that, the sense of hurrying through life, and it invents a kind of composite figure made of myself and the expats I hung about with in our sort of non-place place:
We’re miles from the city,
in an outlying village, though above us
huge and garish, the neon letters blurt our residence
onto the rice fields and inside, too,
lit by wine, coffee, amaro,
we shine on the night as if we meant to stay.
Although I still like a good few of the poems in it, I think now the book is only partially successful; its best moments might be in the poems you mention, which are restless and uneasy but maybe, too, a bit freer, a bit less constrained by the limits of the life. In ‘Here and There: A Notebook’, different places, different histories, different emotional weathers compete. There’s west coast Ireland, and there’s the slightly oppressive terrace in Hilversum, where I found myself islanded for a couple of years, missing Amsterdam, missing Dublin, and very much plotting escape. ‘Death of a Travel Writer’ I wrote in Milan, where I’d ended up after Holland. It’s a more or less comic take on the tropes of travel writing, part biography, part diary, part dream or fantasy. Although the voice is that of a travel writer, there’s no very precise geography, nor is it ever very clear whether a given poem is memory, fantasy, or dream. The borders overlap constantly, and the territory is deliberately foggy, blurred. The looseness also means that the sequence doesn’t have anything like a carefully orchestrated structure – this goes back to what I was saying earlier about series versus sequences. There’s not necessarily a progression from poem to poem, and I wasn’t interested in any kind of ramifying resolution. It’s more of a constellation of disparate stars with the voice itself as the one unifying fact.
COR: For all their imaginative richness and historical breadth, I like that I can peer into your poems and see the society I grew up in, where people watch ʻMoviesʼ and electric ʻWiresʼ traverse the urban and suburban skyline, two storeys up. In one piece, you go in search of the people preserved in “video archives, / confident the light will hold / and their voices be heard”. In another, ʻCinemasʼ, “the world that unfolds / outside the obsessive window is the windowʼs own”. Technologies filter and pervade our daily lives, often obsolescing with us as we go. Are you a technologically tuned in person? Are you a movie buff? Your poems can be quite cinematic on occasion – cutting and fading between scenes, drawing together images and memories in a manner akin to montage.
PS: I think I’ve always been fascinated by both technology and cinema. I love film, I love going to the cinema, I love immersing myself in the dark space of the theatre and letting the actions and images and music wash over me. And it’s a family addiction, Enda and Freya are film-mad too. I think I was always trying to write filmic poems and probably not succeeding much. I’ve been at it again recently writing an ekphrastic or ekfilmic poem as a tribute to Patrick Keiller’s extraordinary film, London (1994), a sort of essay film, narrated by Paul Scofield, one of a series he did on England. They’re cod documentaries, with fictional characters. In London, for instance, Paul Scofield’s narrator is unseen and unnamed. The human subject, also unseen, is Robinson, his friend and ex-lover, who is obsessed with London.
One of the poems you mention, ‘Movies’, proceeds as if life was a film: “Their lives were so well done / we are still struggling with our coats / in the threadbare plush.” And I was watching a film the other day where Marco Bellochio turns the camera on his own family in his search for his brother who committed suicide and thinking again what a poetic medium film is. The best films are poetry. And I think poets can learn a lot from film, from the economy of gesture and image, and the kind of jump cuts that take you from one experience and location and emotional crux to another. Also risk-taking – for all that film is a narrative-driven art, whereas poetry isn’t, the most interesting films play with perspective, form and timing in ways that are of great interest to a poet. And likewise with technology – some of the earliest poems I wrote were about computers and robots and where the technology might take us. There’s some of that in the latest book too, poems about AI and robots. We live in exciting and troubling times in terms of all the advancements in disruptive technology that challenges what we understand about intelligence and consciousness and creativity. And all of course designed by giant corporations that have their eyes on our brains and their hands in our pockets. We have to be alert to whatever possibilities and threats we’re presented with, we can never just take the world as a given, and our humanity – slippery term – has to be vigilantly defended against the not always obvious attempts to compromise it.
COR: Thereʼs a self-assurance to this volume that seems distinctive, even by the standard of your early books. On page after page, the “sun comes through / with a hungry clarity” to illuminate “the lost things, beginnings, after all this time / discovered” (to quote ʻDestinationsʼ). One space of self-discovery, where “lost things” seem to gather, is Waterford, the “city / Of my childhood”. Iʼd be interested to hear more about your connection to Waterford – as explored in ʻNewtown Roadʼ, for example.
PS: One of the things I react against on the rare occasions when I look at work from this period is the kind of fluency or self-assurance you mention. I think I was coming to the point where I’d begun to move away from that sort of certainty or fluency and be more interested in uncertainty of perspective or language, in trying to widen things out, be more open-ended. In truth, like a lot of poets I probably have different poems and different traditions jostling inside and as soon as one side gets the upper hand the other pulls it down and tries to take over. I don’t ever reach a settled point where I feel this style, that approach is the definitive one, or this is the path I’m going to follow forever. You’re right, though, about that returning to a lost childhood place. The cover of the book is a Michael Kane woodcut of a swing, from the poem of that title. The poem is addressed to an unspecified “you”, as a lot of the poems in this book are, but in this case it could be a parent, or a kind of guardian angel, or a version the speaker’s self. That tree and that swing are emblematic of childhood, or a particular point in childhood, where you go back and meet yourself, or a version of yourself who swings towards you and away from you at the same time. I prefer the poems in that book that are least sure of themselves, most open, maybe most film-like, such as ‘From the Archives’ or ‘From the Brochure’, ‘Wires’ or ‘Through the Window’, which is a poem I seem to keep on writing.
Robin Robertson once edited a book with poems from the 32 counties of Ireland with photos by Donovan Wylie, and I was the Waterford representative. The poem was ‘Newtown Road’ but the connection with the city and county was so tangential it bemused the publishers and didn’t, I suppose, do justice to the place. I was born and lived in Waterford until I was nine. My parents were from the West of Ireland, but my father, who worked in a bank, had been transferred to Waterford and from there to Dublin. But I have very vivid memories of Waterford, the school I went to, the streets and nearby park, but most of all the house we lived in, a big old house in Newtown Road subdivided into several flats. We had two floors at the top of the house which I can still see clearly. There was a large garden and if you went enough down the back, past the orchard we were forbidden to enter, you’d get to the river. I think the first places we remember have a special hold, they’re more than just physical places, the house is a kind of key, as Bachelard has it, “for childhood is certainly greater than reality”. That’s certainly true; he said the house was “the topography of our intimate being”, where memory and the soul lodge. Soul and memory tend to fuse, so I suppose that’s what I’m after when I dream of those places or try to visit them in poems.
COR: How did you settle on the title of this collection? It derives, I think, from the poem, ʻEscape Manualʼ: “there is after all a way of falling, / there is always some way down.” Is there another resonance to the phrase? What does it evoke for you?
PS: It comes from that poem. The poem is looking for some kind of escape, a release into a different kind of dimension or consciousness, maybe. An escape from a certain kind of self-consciousness too. I could probably think of a better title now, if I had to, but the falling alludes to the kind of restlessness and dislocation that are everywhere in that book. I always seemed to be caught between states of excitement and alienation in those years, loving the novelty of wherever I was, in yet another temporary room or apartment, excited by Italy in particular but a little less so by the city I was living in. I feel like the person who wrote that book was a distant relative, but I suppose you always feel like that if you read old stuff. I want to get him by the scruff of the neck and shake him up. I was thirty when the book came out, so the poems were written before that and read a bit too much like the work of someone who needs to sort out a few things and lose a few affectations. There are some things in it that I’d still go back to and stand by. ‘Through the Window’ is one, or maybe the satire of ‘A Few Helpful Hints’ and some of the others I’ve mentioned. I’m aways pretty much only interested in whatever I’m doing right at the moment. You can’t sit around admiring or disparaging yourself, fun though that might be. And once a book is published it tends to disappear from the consciousness. It can be physically painful to sit down and open an old book…
COR: I confess that when I first spied “the young man” who appears in ʻAn Exileʼ, “basking in the lamplight and listing, again, / what the city lacks”, I assumed that he was some version of yourself – combined, perhaps, with Samuel Beckettʼs Krapp, whose soliloquising you adapt in the poem, ʻSpoolsʼ. Was Beckett – a willing exile, recently deceased – on your mind in this period? By 1991 you had returned to Ireland from abroad. As youʼve suggested, the poems you were writing pivot on dichotomies of precarity and belonging, roaming desire and rooted yearning – the idea of home “floating free”, like “the street I live in now, my eye / adrift already...”. How did you feel about coming back to Dublin?
PS: There are too many versions of myself in that book. I had to keep trying on selves because I wasn’t too sure who exactly I was or what I should be doing. But yes, ‘An Exile’ imagines a Joyce- or Beckett-like figure rooted in exile but hungry too for news of the old place. The poem imagines the disgruntled exile on the point of departure, ‘listing again’, as you say, ‘what the city lacks’. Obviously, mine wasn’t real exile, I abandoned it after six years, but I was interested in the idea of exile as a rude gesture to the homeland as well as a purely economic or socio-cultural-sexual decision. I wasn’t very enchanted by the country I’d left, I suppose, so that feeds into it. Coming back to Dublin was interesting. The city was undergoing some interesting changes. There were new initiatives, new cultural institutions, the Temple Bar Cultural Quarter and all that, and I’d gotten a job as Director of the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square. I loved being back, re-establishing old friendships and making new ones, organising events, going to the theatre, the pubs, being a part of the life of the city. And enjoying reconnecting with the physical fabric of the city. And I think I started to write better poems, poems that both drew on the experiences of life abroad and the new life.