Brink opens with its title-poem and it stays on the brink of various worlds and conditions throughout. Most crucial is the brink between life and death, each of which is seen from the perspective of the other as in the great five-part sequence ‘Republic’, showing how death is interwoven into life. But, precarious as the brink is, the unyieldingly sympathetic foundation of these poems in the reality of family and immediate perception is wholly redemptive. Ferriter’s is a world aware of Rilke’s beauty and terror; Art, particularly music, offers consolation for the fragility and terror of the world in Bosnia or Afghanistan or Civil War Kerry. There are great, redemptive elegies for Shane McGowan, Sinead O’Connor and Seamus Begley.
