Brink is the much-anticipated debut collection of poems by Irish poet Cian Ferriter.
“There are many poems to savour in Cian Ferriter’s first full-length collection, Brink, a fine, thoughtful book … [an] excellent debut.”
Richard Hayes, Poetry Ireland Review“Cian Ferriter’s 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. Eastern wisdom offers images for the here and now of Ireland; the poem ‘Letting Go’ , locates us within the Tibetan notion of ‘bardo’, the transitional intermediate state between life and death. 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, Sinéad O’Connor and Seamus Begley. The sympathetic basis of these poems always brings our world, like the title-poem, back from the brink in this wonderfully positive book.”
— Bernard O’Donoghue“Spirited, vivid, deeply felt, Brink illuminates the everyday with great heart and grace, gifts us a tender sanctuary.”
— Enda Wyley
BRINK
Between shifts, the nurses off-guard,
you climb into bed beside me,
tenderly re-arranging lines and tubes
until you can wrap your arms
around my wilted torso –
the arms that wrapped around me
against a Leitrim snowdrift high as a house,
under a swollen Saharan moon,
up a laneway off Liffey Street
as we tumbled back from a gig,
under the black canopy of an oak
on Old Head, the Atlantic whistling,
on the mossy floor of a Wicklow wood –
the arms that have held our lives to account,
that carry me, now, back from the brink.
Brink by Cian Ferriter.
140 x 216 mm. 70 pp
ISBN PB 9781915629494
ISBN HB 9781915629487
October 2025
Cover artwork ‘Enclosure on a Mountain’ by Maria Simonds-Gooding, by kind permission.
Brink by Cian Ferriter
