On Balance

by Sinéad Morrissey

Overview

Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award. Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinéad Morrissey’s sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland – the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane – celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in ‘Articulation’ we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, ‘whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz’, suspended in time ‘for however long he lasts before he crumbles’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784103606
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	07/01/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and was a lecturer in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.

Table of Contents

The Millihelen 9

At the Moscow State Circus 10

On Balance 11

Receiving the Dead 12

Platinum Anniversary 15

Nativity 16

At the Balancing Lakes 18

Perfume 20

Tribute 23

Collier 24

My Seventeenth-Century Girlhood 30

The Mayfly 32

My Life According to You 36

Articulation 39

Das Ding an Sich 41

The Singing Gates 42

Meteor Shower 48

Colour Photographs of Tsarist Russia 46

Whitelessness 51

The Wheel of Death 57

Very Dyspraxic Child 61

The Rope 63

From The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices 65

Notes 69

Acknowledgements 71