The Gravity Wave by Peter Sirr (review)

Peter Sirr is a winner of the Patrick Kavanagh and O’Shaughnessy Awards whose collections have been published by Gallery Press for nearly four decades. Yet his evocative and insightful poetry is far less known outside of Ireland than it deserves to be. For those unfamiliar with his work, The Gravity Wave, his tenth collection, may serve as an introduction to this poet, translator, and teacher who clears an inviting path through the landscapes of Irish poetry.

With forms and themes similar to Derek Mahon’s visitations of classical subjects, Sirr’s poems observe classical customs and propose revisionist approaches to traditional tropes, as the Homeric lyric “Home” reveals:

  Diminished? Really? Gods don’t hold us, the templeswither, the priests are all in salesbut the sun still shines, the oxen lowand the winedark sea is still as dark as wine.

  Come with me now to where dawn  dips her rosy toes by the harbour wall.  Lust for home is overrated, it’s the lust  for time that kills us all. This place was lost

  when you first looked back, the only home  is the air you stand in, your creaking bones . . .

The diction and lineation make clear that there is no point in lamenting for a classical past or feeling nostalgia for “home” when we could still savor the sun and the sea and must recognize that “it’s the lust / for time that kills us all.” This startling redirection from places toward time and a sense of mortality is reinforced by the last lines: “. . . the only home / is the air you stand in, your creaking bones . . .” As Sirr then expresses it, “Creak on. Live in the changes . . .”

As the deeply poignant dialogue between Aeneas and Anchises in The Aeneid Book VI reminds us, elegiac poems about fathers take different forms, but the emphasis is always on the son’s attempts at communication with his departed father. In “Older,” the poem restores the poet’s father to life so that they can talk and walk together. There is so much news to share:

Could this be uspatrolling the streets  my anxious steps  persuading you home    Here’s my daughter you never knew    she shines in her bones like the sun    here’s my wife with a hug to greet you . ..

This narrative poem shows with great filial emotion that the son wants to restore his father to his place as the family’s leader: “Not a thing but to love the steps / wish I could follow / not lead, there was something / I might offer yet . . .” In the last lines, in careful diction and spare rhythms, the poem concludes with the image of the father’s “disappeared” watch “still going, still full of time” and restored to his son who “slipped it on and fell behind” in their imaginary walk. In this elegiac meditation and other poems in The Gravity Wave, Peter Sirr invites us to inhabit a province of thought and feeling that reshapes our familiarity with the known world.