After Borges

1. To a minor poet

Where are the days you spent on earth,
all the joy and anguish
that were your universe?

The river of years has washed them away;
now you survive
as an entry in the index.

Proudly they gather, the gods’ gifts, immortal.
Of you, dark friend, all we know
is that one evening you heard the nightingale.

Walking fields of asphodels, your slighted shade
must think the gods harsh
but the days are a tangle of paltry needs

and is there really a blessing richer
than the ash of which oblivion’s made?
For others the gods kindled

a persistent light: see
how it shines in every crevice, finds every flaw
and in the end shrivels the rose it treasures.

They were kinder to you, brother, passing you by,
leaving you to the nightingale in the garden
in the thrill of a dusk which will never darken.

2. To whoever is reading me

You’re untouchable. Haven’t they told you,
the powers that control your every move,
that dust is certain? Or did you imagine
your stepping into it could slow the river?

The slab has been ordered, you won’t
be reading it. Date, time and place
already inscribed, a well-judged epitaph.
And not just you – everyone else is a dream
of time, neither deathless bronze nor shining gold.

The universe like you is a shifting stream.
You’ll be a dark shade walking
to promised darkness, the route is fixed.
In a sense, you could say, you’re already dead.

3. Everness

There’s only one thing that doesn’t exist – oblivion.
God, who saves the metal, hoards the dross
and files in his prophetic memory
moons yet to shine with those long gone.
Everything is there. Every reflection
from dawn to dusk you left behind in mirror
after mirror, and every face you’ll go on leaving.
And everything is fixed in its place
in the eternal memory of the universe.
Corridors like labyrinths, the sound of doors
endlessly closing. . . but only
from the other side of the setting sun,
should you ever get there,
will you see the archetypes and the splendours.

A poem from The Rooms

Poem beginning with two lines by André Breton

The wardrobe is filled with linen,
there are even moonbeams I can unfold.
The roof has slipped back on the gables,
old trees march in from the cold.

The wardrobe is filled with linen,
the beds are slept in again.
Out of the air spill table and chairs,
the wine has crept back to the rim.

The wardrobe is filled with linen,
the drawers are packed with days.
The cabinet lies unsmashed in its corner,
there’s a harvest of sun on the floor.

The wardrobe is filled with linen,
the shadows come back to the wall.
They’ve gone to collect the children
from the strangers who stand in the hall.

The rooms are empty and cold,
the drawers are littered with bones.
The wardrobe is filled with linen
no-one can touch or unfold.

This appeared in yesterday's Irish Times but as the formatting got mangled on the Times' website I'm reposting it here. The collection it's taken from, The Rooms, will be published by Gallery Press in November.

Writing the city

I was asked to give a talk for the UCD Scholarcast series on 'If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song', the anthology of poems about Dublin which is this year's choice for 'One City, One Book'.

Here's the opening of the talk. The podcast and pdf are here


Peter Sirr

Writing the City

How do you write about a city? How do you even define a city? A place, a history, geography, sociology, centres and peripheries, monuments and wastelands. A map of possibilities, an elusive map, coming in and out of focus, full of gaps and smudges. City is an abstract word like world or nation or country. You write from your particular apprehension of it, out of your own particular moment. Maybe you don’t write about it at all. From it, out of it. . . I’ve always liked what Roy Fisher said about Birmingham – Birmingham’s what I write with. The city as instrument, mode of exploration, investigation.

‘All cities are geological,’ Ivan Chtcheglov, tells us.

You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.’ (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

If Ever You Go, an anthology of Dublin poems is a brave attempt to map the geology and psychogeography of a city.  It’s necessarily a challenging and contradictory kind of project because for all its apparent coherence the vision has to remain fragmentary, lodged in the subjective imaginings of the poets and song writers the city has somehow impinged on.

The editors reach for the idea of a map to organise the material – this is, the book says, a map of Dublin in poetry and song and the book is organised geographically, to emphasise that idea, with its Northside, Liffeyside and Southside sections. Maps imply exhaustiveness, a comprehensive overview, a definitive charting of the territory. I think of John Rocque’s great 1756 map with its 11,645 houses, every single building in Dublin according to the man himself. George II was so impressed with it that he hung it in his apartments, maybe because it offered a tantalising image of completeness.

Poets, though, aren’t cartographers and their collective responses can’t really create a decipherable map. Precisely because of the complexity of responses – or indeed non-responses – a literary map is always a pretty notional idea.
I think for instance of  Patrick Kavanagh who provides the title for this anthology. Dublin was many things for him – refuge, shark pond, village, a place of spiritual redemption. But it’s his ghost that stalks the city in ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin Town’, the city viewed from the grave, where the print of his own past might linger, a dishevelled shade ‘Playing through the railings with little children/Whose children have long since died.’ Dublin for Kavanagh was the place he happened to be, an anyplace for the spirit to grow if it can. He leaves us his print, his map with its named streets, Baggot Street, Pembroke Road, Raglan Road, enough for us to make a Kavanagh-land out of, but he knows the place doesn’t matter:

He knew that posterity had no use
For anything but the soul,
The lines that speak the passionate heart,

The spirit that lives alone.
O he was a lone one,
Fol do the di do
O he was a lone one,
And I tell you

Kavanagh’s relationship is with his spirit, what he cultivates is the vagabond and uncategorisable life of the spirit: the city is where that cultivation happens, which is why it’s both a private and universal place. What we see of the city in the poems is the urban village that was his stamping ground, a micro city, a city of the overlooked and under appreciated: canal water, barges

                                the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins - an art lover’s woe,
    (‘The Hospital’)

all of these the sites of the deepest kind of celebration, of loafing and soul-inviting.

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