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After The Fall / Brian Kirk

After The Fall

By: Brian Kirk

€12.00
Brian Kirk’s poetry exhibits mastery of craft and respect for both poetic form and experiment. In his ‘broken song / from restless birds’, he displays the contemplative gifts of the natural philosopher. Here we have an Everyman exploring the joys of love and familial relationships, the tedium of office and farm work, the disappointments of religion and world politics, ‘and the rest / that makes our lives so blunderin...
ISBN 978-1-910669-99-0
Pub Date Thursday, November 09, 2017
Cover Image Photography by Jessie Lendennie
Page Count 76
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Brian Kirk’s poetry exhibits mastery of craft and respect for both poetic form and experiment. In his ‘broken song / from restless birds’, he displays the contemplative gifts of the natural philosopher. Here we have an Everyman exploring the joys of love and familial relationships, the tedium of office and farm work, the disappointments of religion and world politics, ‘and the rest / that makes our lives so blundering, so blessed’.

Breda Wall Ryan


Brian Kirk’s poetry is a poetry of time and place. In poems of controlled passion and energy, he maps out his territory which, on the surface is domestic, but on closer examination reveals something much deeper. God, religion, family, and above all love as it is in its reality without any dressing or highflown nonsense. The poems here are as tender as they are vulnerable: lovers, children, fathers, sons, uncles – the whole gamut of family life – all are treated with compassion, and whatever questions he raises he never opts for glib or easy formulation. “She walked into the Sheaf of Wheat one night and disappeared.” So opens one of the poems, (Persephone), with the compacted mystery of a Dashiell Hammett. Something has fallen and given way, and Brian Kirk’s poems miraculously sift the wreckage for its poetry and human mystery.

Brian Kirk

Brian Kirk is an award-winning poet, short story writer and novelist from Dublin. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem “Birthday” won the Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2018. His short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition and was published by Southword Editions in 2019. He is a recipient of Professional Development and Agility Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. His novel Riverrun was chosen as a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and was shortlisted for the Spotlight First Novel Award 2023. His poetry has been published in the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, Abridged, Skylight 47, Crannóg and many others. His poetry has been featured on The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio One, the Words Lightly Spoken Podcast and the Poetry Jukebox installations in Limerick and Derry in 2023 as part of the Poetry As Commemoration strand. Brian has been a guest author and hosted events at literary festivals around the country including Dublin Book Festival, Listowel Writers’ Week, Red Line Book Festival, Cork Short Story Festival, Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer Poetry Festival, Belfast Book Festival and Bray Literary Festival. He is a member of the Hibernian Writers’ Group. www.briankirkwriter.com.  

At the Archive Reading Room

Step off the street into the silence,
climb the stairs, produce your card
and push into the past.
Directories and almanacs, 
old books and manuscripts,
lie waiting in repose for invocation,
your mark upon a chit of paper.
Withered maps and photographs, 
guidebooks from a distant time, 
ephemera of one kind or another
are wheeled along on soundless trolleys,
quickened, photocopied, browsed, returned, 
temperature controlled.

Here you will find 
your faceless ancestors
buried in dusty books, 
in boxes on marked shelves,
under the dead leaves 
of never-read pamphlets
and dog-eared photographs.

Readers are advised to take care
when handling manuscripts,
pencils only can be used for taking notes.
Archive materials are fragile, often irreplaceable,
so you are requested not to write on them,
not to lean on them,
not to place any object on top of them.
Record-keeping is an art,
not an act of administration.
Keep conversation to a minimum,
turn off your mobile phone or silence it.

Sit quietly and wait until
the flat file of their disaster
opens out across your desk: 
the sundered walls, the roof collapsed,
the salty tears of barefoot children
washing dirty faces.

Time is passing. Ineluctably the 
wheels will turn, the walls will fall, 
all things will keep, tears dry in time.



Life Is Elsewhere 

Even the sound of a goods train
passing in the night,
rattling the rotten frame 
of my childhood window;
even that spoke to me then
of a life I was missing.
Later, the dead eyes of a stranger
on the bus home from school, 
unshaven and shabby in creased overcoat,
a worn paperback in his pocket;
he lived the life I both feared and desired.
Or the men who stood on the
doorsteps of pubs, or bookmakers,
cigarettes hidden in hands with stained fingers;
these were the ones I yearned to be counted among – 
not the good, the polite and the young.
But I was bound by the kindness of others,
obliged to be who I was
out of duty and love;
I had to create out of nothing
false reasons to fight 
where no fight was sought,
to reject all that was given for free
in a house where I knew only love.



Shallow Grave

I never thought that I would find him 
cold and dead, stretched out in a stranger’s yard, 
as if sleeping – but not sleeping – numb, hard
as the frozen ground, draped in a fine skim
of winter’s leavings. Only an old cat,
an insignificant death you might say – 
Aristotle certainly saw it that way – 
when compared to a human life lost; that
is what vexes some people, that feline
or canine can be treated like human,
cried over like lovers, valued like someone
you lived with and loved throughout their decline.
The divine in me with apt insouciance
digs a shallow grave and buries nuisance. 


Poems © Copyright Brian Kirk 2017


Other Titles from Brian Kirk

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