Peter Sirr was born in Waterford in 1960 and educated at Trinity College Dublin. He now lives in Dublin where, until 2003, he was Director of the Irish Writers' Centre. He now works as a freelance writer, editor, and translator and is the editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He is published in Ireland by The Gallery Press.

Peter Sirr's Selected Poems gathers work from the early poems in Marginal Zones (winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1982), Talk, Talk (1987), Ways of Falling (1991), The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange (1995), which received the O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry (1998), and Bring Everything (2000). He is one of the brightest stars of the generation of Irish poets born in the 1960s.

"Everyone who takes poetry seriously should read him attentively."
Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish Times

"There is a satisfying notion of understatement in many of these well-wrought and intelligent poems [from On The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange], supporting the notion that Sirr is one of our most watchable younger poets." Fred Johnson, Books Ireland

"...Sirr is at the center of contemporary Irish poetry."
Mary-Sherman Willis, Poet Lore

Desire

Reconstruct me from a closing bookshop,
from the panic of shelves
where old cars trick the spirit, manuals
of self-repair; gods, geography, money

and little time. Sniff the air in poetry,
lay a blanket down and wait
where a furious concentration hunches over
Teach Yourself Amharic, Aramaic:

there's hardly time to say hello, hardly
a hair's breadth of the language to take away;
enough to be silent in, enough to watch
the insistent dust-mote

grow its mountain, the dromedaries
appear. Someone is arguing
in Old Norse, the sun wakes up in Persian
and I am walking out

with grains of light, pyramid crumbs.
Elsewhere, in the desert, in the hilltop village,
on an endless, meandering train
the soul puts down its books, fluent again.

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ISBN 1-930630-22-0
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