From the early poems in Marginal Zones which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award when he was twenty-two to his breakthrough collections, The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange, which received the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry (1998), and his recent Bring Everything, Peter Sirr’s Selected Poems represents a winnowing of five substantial, significant books — with the bonus of previously uncollected and new poems.
Excerpts from sequences and longer works communicate an uncommon imaginative sweep. Fluent lyrics and ample fragments accommodate his wry observations, exotic references and sensual force. As the O’Shaughnessy citation asserted, his ‘welcome art has come to distinguish a new generation of Irish poets whose urbanities have a clearly European aspect’. Selected Poems demonstrates persuasive testimony to a wholeness of technique and vision and recognizes that ‘we can no more live singly than light can fall on one place only’.