The Now Slice

Poem of the week: The Now Slice 

A new work by Peter Sirr

 Irish Times, Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 06:00

Breakfast is over, you’ve gone to the hard world.
Ulysses struggles from a speaker, nearly dead.
He flails in the waves, a towering headland
staring him down. Where’s help here?
The floor turns stone, the kitchen Mycenaean.
The dog sprawls on the couch, lost in a dream
of toast and cats. A fruit fly climbs a jar
to dangerous honey. I lift my cup and a star
explodes, a meteor crashes into the moon.
A blue alien looks out along his slice of time.
He’s going to school, maybe. When he comes back
the future will already be over. Only Ulysses
will still be here. He’s found a riverbank now
and friendly leaves. Athena rains down sleep on his eyes.


Peter Sirr has published several collections, including The Rooms, Nonetheless and Bring Everything. Today’s poem is from his new collection, The Gravity Wave (Gallery Press)

The Gravity Wave

The Gravity Wave, the eleventh collection, a Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation, has just been published. The launch is next Thursday in Poetry Ireland, along with new books by Gerald Dawe, Medb mcGuckian and a John Montague Selected Poems.

Launch

Info about the book here

“I don’t want to count deer, I want/ to count in deer…” – Peter Sirr is as deliciously surprising as ever in Deer, Phoenix Park, one of the eight exceptionally fine sonnets which begin The Gravity Wave (Gallery €11.95). “Antler, Forest, Eyes,/ Stillness, Speed, Hide…I’d like/ this currency to fall between us/where we step invisibly from the car/slipped from ourselves to kneel/grass-lit and concentrated, close to a road/that keeps wobbling and clarifying/like the rim of the world or the end of speech.”

– Martina Evan, Irish Times review