The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For November, we are delighted to publish three new works by Brian Kirk. Here, Brian discusses the creative process behind these new poems.

In early 2023 I wrote a short poem about a family from a child’s point of view. I called it ‘Keepsakes’. At the time I was finishing work on my second collection Hare’s Breath (Salmon Poetry, 2023), but I sensed this poem didn’t belong in it.

The poem was inspired to a degree by the prose poems of Charles Simic who had died that January. Naturally enough when you read a lot of poetry by a given writer, you begin to see their influence appear in your own work. I tend to use a fair amount of form in my poetry and even in the free verse I write, I’m very conscious of the fact that I adopt my own set of constraints or loose forms while I’m shaping the poem. Simic’s prose poems were attractive to me for three reasons. Firstly, because they seemed by their nature quite un-poetic and I wanted to experiment with that in my own work. Secondly, I was attracted by his ability to incorporate the surreal in poems that still remained grounded and focused. The third, and perhaps most attractive aspect of his work to me, was his ability to make me laugh, something that doesn’t happen too often in poetry and certainly not often enough in my poems. (For years my father-in-law encouraged me without success to write a ‘funny one’.)

‘Keepsakes’ isn’t a funny poem as such, but it has moments of surreality which nudge it in that direction: grandparents kept in a box on top of a wardrobe and children who dissolve into thin air. I sensed the poem was important and put it to one side. After a few months I began to attempt other prose poems with varying success. From these attempts arose a series of poems written in a childish / childlike voice about the past, my own past in fact. I was using small events, places and people from my childhood as starting points. I began to think of these poems as different from my other memory poems, as a separate sequence, structured around the calendar of a 1970’s semi-rural childhood, which was demarcated by school, religious and secular holidays, local geography, weather and family. It seemed appropriate that I wrote twelve of these poems, even though they don’t necessarily equate with each month of the year.

Almanacs were annual publications in the past, providing people with a wealth of information on subjects that ranged from the weather, to farming, to holy days, to the phases of the moon and much more besides. Aimed primarily at rural folk, it was replaced this century, as so many things were, by the internet. In looking back and writing these strange poems it felt like I was creating a record of how we lived then by using small fragmentary incidents from my past viewed through a lens skewed by innocence. In doing this I created an account of a past that no longer exists in a country that has moved during my lifetime from being a suffocating and inward-looking place to being a diverse and multicultural modern state. There can be no doubt that neither version is or was perfect. My hope – as it always is when I write a poem – is that readers will find some correspondences in their own experience.

My other hope stated here is that these poems will entertain the reader also. A seaside town in North County Dublin in the 1970s may not be the most exciting of locations for a young boy, but it had its attractions, and it posed serious challenges to a young mind that wanted to understand and meet the wider world. Looking back, those times can seem innocent or even ignorant by modern standards, but there were major changes afoot that we were perhaps not conscious of at the time, but somehow we registered an upheaval in those moments when our understanding of the world was confounded by a status quo we were led to believe would always prevail.

At the moment I’m working towards completing my third poetry collection Black Cat Almanac and this sequence of twelve poems will form the opening section.

Brian Kirk has published two poetry collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023). His poem ‘Birthday’ won 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.