{"id":4524,"date":"2015-02-23T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T09:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4524"},"modified":"2016-01-23T16:11:46","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T15:11:46","slug":"peter-sirr-the-rooms-the-gallery-press-reviewed-by-david-cooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4524","title":{"rendered":"Peter Sirr, The Rooms<\/em> (The Gallery Press) \u20ac11.95, reviewed by David Cooke"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Rooms<\/i> is Peter Sirr\u2019s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word \u2018home\u2019, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work.\u00a0 By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It is not surprising, therefore, that throughout his poetic career he has explored the dichotomy between \u2018home\u2019, seen often as a temporary refuge, and \u2018exile\u2019, its obverse image: \u2018That\u2019s it all \/ exile and interlude, that the grass \/ escapes me, the implements hang heavy in my hands \/\/ that the roads are narrow but the wind is mine.\u2019 \u2018Mapmaker\u2019s Song\u2019, Sirr\u2019s opening poem, is a prologue to what follows. A statement of intent, an ars poetica, <\/i>it is <\/i>a bravura performance which invites the reader to follow in its footsteps:<\/p>\n

The mapmaker downed his tools.
\nI\u2019ve caught it: every alley, ever street,
\nevery fanlight and window ledge,
\nthe city fixed and framed.<\/p>\n

Sirr\u2019s project here will seem reminiscent of Joyce\u2019s mapping of Dublin or, more recently, Ciaran Carson\u2019s Belfast poems, but in this poem there is also a sense of restlessness, so that the evocation of details seems never quite complete:<\/p>\n

Now I want everything else,
\nI want to be a historian of footsteps,
\na cartographer of hemlines and eyelids,
\nI want to catch what the pavements say
\nwhen they sing to each other
\nin their deep laboratories, plotting
\nevery journey since the place began.<\/p>\n

Having established a mood and sketched out his terrain, Sirr explores it in a group of nine individual poems before moving on to \u2018The Rooms\u2019, the collection\u2019s eponymous sequence.\u00a0 Among these there is \u2018House for Sale\u2019, a fine version of Andre Fr\u00e9naud\u2019s classic \u2018Maison \u00e0 vendre<\/i>\u2019 and a poem about Robert Graves on the island of Mallorca. \u2018Nando\u2019s Table\u2019 is an attractive celebration of domesticity and friendship: \u2019and that must have been it, or something like it: \/ pane, olio, formaggio, sole<\/i> \/ Nando\u2019s table washed with October, \/ all of us sitting there as if for ever.\u2019 \u2018Delirium\u2019 is a study in bereavement in which it is the daily routine of chores, \u2018a thousand \/ ancient duties \u2026 a thousand fretting tasks\u2019, that helps a widow to survive; while \u2018Whalefall\u2019 is a strikingly memorable evocation of mortality in which the carcass of a beached whale becomes a habitable space for the waves of tiny creatures who strip it down and then probe the very marrow of its bones until, like houses of bricks and mortar, this huge bone-house also disappears.<\/p>\n

Good as these poems are, it is the collection\u2019s burnished central sequence that impresses most. \u00a0Divided into three sections with a coda in memory of the Irish poet Dennis O\u2019Driscoll, it consists of thirty-three blank sonnets arranged variously as to their line length and stanzaic form. A remarkably precocious poet, Sirr had three full collections under his belt by the time he reached his thirties. However, from as far back as his 1995 collection, The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange, <\/i>he has shown a willingness to explore longer, more open-ended structures, that move beyond the limits of the well crafted set piece. In the opening stanzas of the first poem in \u20181 CONTINUAL VISIT\u2019 there is a wonderfully poised and musical evocation of rural isolation and a darkness far removed from the polluting lights of town:<\/p>\n

Somehow a wilderness grows. The grasses
\nare full of small animals, the nights so absolute
\nyou could haul yourself through blackness to the stars
\nand stream down like a stray god on the meadow.<\/p>\n

In the next sonnet the poet imagines an afterlife in which there seems to be an exhilarating trade off between security and freedom:<\/p>\n

To be loosed like that, streaming through the black countryside
\nor stopped somewhere, holed up in a ditch, stretched
\non a bale under the whistling galvanize \u2026
\nand darkness floats your whole life down, the whole span
\nsettles on skin and hair, everything you were
\nlike branches coming together, a forest of small touches.<\/p>\n

Sometimes restlessness is balanced against a zenlike calm: \u2018Star-gathering, lake-stalking \/\/ pilgrim head plugged in to draw the powers \/ out of what my leisure falls on.\u2019 Trying frequently to capture the ineffable, Sirr convincingly demonstrates that the \u2018poetic\u2019 has little to do with straining after effect, but is more a question of well observed images and a music that is grounded in natural speech. This he achieves even at his most literary, as in these lines with their buried quote from Rilke: \u2018Who has no house now will hang his hat \/ on the ramshackle, the provisional, a summer\u2019s \/\/ quick labour; will sit for hours inheriting a silence \/ stitched with warblers and lake tunes.\u2019<\/p>\n

In ‘2 HOUSED UNHOUSED’ the poet comes in from the cold to catch up with his lares<\/i> and penates<\/i>: \u2018small gods have come to rest \/ in hearth and threshold, tile and countertop, \/ in doors, in handles smooth from long use.\u2019 Perhaps, too, a hint of irony can be detected in this first sonnet\u2019s conclusion: \u2018\u2019Robed with home we go \/ from room to room moving with grace, \/ lords of our little universe.\u2019 Elsewhere his lines have an intensity that is reminiscent of Proust:<\/p>\n

\u2026 dream of the footscraper
\noutside the door, the march of a hundred shoes
\nshining with purpose, climbing through floors,
\ndream of the linen chest, the rims of glasses,
\nhands in the air, hands within hands, the memories
\nof bones \u2026<\/p>\n

In \u20183 DRIFT\u2019, the sequence\u2019s final section, we sense that there is a fine line between\u00a0 security and entrapment and that existential uncertainty may be the price we have to pay if we are to become ourselves and escape the ghosts of the past: \u2018I woke in darkness, someone else\u2019s, \/ someone\u2019s night into which I\u2019d slipped like a draught \/ and lay like nothing, unbodied, unselfed.\u2019 Having at this point, like Eliot, brought his \u2018exploring\u2019 to a provisional halt, Sirr presents the reader with another group of free- standing poems before moving on, in another long sequence, to explore the life and work of Bertolt Brecht. \u00a0Opening up new perspectives on what has gone before, the poet gives ample testimony, also, to his polyglot tastes in poetry with a version of Jean Follain\u2019s \u2018Hardware Store\u2019 and pieces inspired by Breton and Borges. In \u2019Habitable Space\u2019 he contemplates the possibility of life in a distant galaxy; while two poems, \u2018Harm\u2019, set in contemporary Syria, and \u2018Elegy\u2019, set in Sixteenth Century Nuremberg, depict the violence that many lives are a prey too.<\/p>\n

Finally, the volume is brought to a close with \u2018An Audience with BB\u2019, a twenty four page collage that incorporates versions of Brecht\u2019s own poems and Sirr\u2019s responses to them. It\u2019s a form that Sirr has used elsewhere to present the Roman poet Catullus and the world of medieval Irish poetry. On this occasion, there is clear parallel between Brecht\u2019s aspiration towards peace and security in the \u2018dark times\u2019 of his Danish exile and Sirr\u2019s brooding peregrinations. A richly imagined and resonant volume, The Rooms,<\/i> is Peter Sirr\u2019s best book to date. It can only be hoped that work of such quality will find him the readership he deserves on this side of the water.
\n 
\nDavid Cooke<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Rooms is Peter Sirr\u2019s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word \u2018home\u2019, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work.\u00a0 By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPeter Sirr, The Rooms (The Gallery Press) \u20ac11.95, reviewed by David Cooke - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4524\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peter Sirr, The Rooms (The Gallery Press) \u20ac11.95, reviewed by David Cooke - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Rooms is Peter Sirr\u2019s eighth collection. 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