Parallax: And Selected Poems

by Sinéad Morrissey

Overview

Sinéad Morrissey is one of the most fascinating talents in international poetry. Recently appointed Belfast's first poet laureate, she creates poems known for their combination of keen intelligence and whispered intimacy.

In Parallax, which won the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize, Morrissey writes of what is captured, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia"), are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a particular perspective. Assured and disquieting, Morrisey's poems explore the paradoxes that result when we attempt to freeze our passing experience through art.

This edition of Parallax also includes a selection of poems from Morrisey's previous collections, published for the first time in the United States. In their variety of subjects and styles they trace the evolution of a poet, showcasing the formal mastery and tenderness that define her work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536138
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of five poetry collections: There Was Fire in Vancouver, Between Here and There, The State of the Prisons, Through the Square Window, and Parallax. She has been the recipient of the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize, the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and first place in the 2007 UK National Poetry Competition. She teaches creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast.

Table of Contents

From Between Here and There (2002)

In Belfast 3

And Forgive Us Our Trespasses 5

In Need of a Funeral 6

Rock Pool 8

Stitches 10

Jo Gravis in His Metal Garden 11

This Century, the Next, the Last 13

An Anatomy of Smell 14

On Waitakere Dam 16

Goldfish 18

Between Here and There 20

Festivals 22

To Imagine an Alphabet 24

From The State of the Prisons (2005)

Flight 29

Generics 31

Pilots 32

From China-2, 3, 5, 7, 9 35

Reading the Greats 40

Clocks 41

The Yellow Emperor's Classic 43

Zero 46

Stepfather 48

The State of the Prisons 52

From Through the Square Window (2009)

Storm 65

Matter 67

Returning from Arizona 71

Found Architecture 72

Vanity Fair 75

Apocrypha 77

Ice 79

'Love, the nightwatch…' 84

Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk 85

Through the Square Window 87

York 89

History 91

Flu 93

Fairground Music 94

Telegraph 96

The Hanging Hare 98

Cathedral 101

Dash 103

Electric Edwardians 104

Shadows in Siberia According to Kapuscinski 106

Don Juan 2012 109

Parallax (2013)

1801 139

Baltimore 140

Shadows 141

Shostakovich 143

Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg 144

Home Birth 148

A Day's Blindness 149

Display 152

Fur 154

Fool's Gold 155

Jigsaw 158

Puzzle 160

Photographing Lowry's House 161

Migraine 166

Daughter 167

V is for Veteran 172

Last Winter 174

A Matter of Life and Death 175

Signatures 180

Through the Eye of a Needle 181

The Doctors 182

The Evil Key 184

Yard Poem 186

Lighthouse 188

The Coal Jetty 189

'Ladies in Spring' by Eudora Welty 192

The Mutoscope 194

The House of Osiris in the Field of Reeds 196

The Party Bazaar 198

The High Window 200

Peacocks and Butterflies 202

A Lie 206

Blog 207

Notes 209

Acknowledgements 211

Editorial Reviews

The outstanding poet of her generation.” —Stephen Knight, The Independent

“Morrissey is one of a number of younger poets from Northern Ireland who are negotiating the mixed blessing of having such illustrious antecedents as [Derek] Mahon and Seamus Heaney. To honour such inheritance requires all the confidence and care of a high-wire act . . . Morrissey is more than up to the task.” —Paul Batchelor, The Guardian

“Parallax is an ambitious and complex collection . . . Structurally, the poems are beautiful: riddled with subterranean passages and false doors, they're easy places to lose your intellectual footing . . . [Morrissey] feels like one of the country's leading poets.” —Charlotte Runcie, The Telegraph

“Parallax is something of a treasure trove . . . Morrissey's poetic framings and exposures of author, reader/viewer, and object in dynamic and angular relation to each other make her a compelling advocate, and exemplary practitioner, of both seeing and doing things differently.” —Fran Brearton, The Guardian

From the Publisher

Parallax is an ambitious and complex collection . . . Structurally, the poems are beautiful: riddled with subterranean passages and false doors, they're easy places to lose your intellectual footing . . . [Morrissey] feels like one of the country's leading poets.

The Telegraph - Charlotte Runcie

Morrissey is one of a number of younger poets from Northern Ireland who are negotiating the mixed blessing of having such illustrious antecedents as [Derek] Mahon and Seamus Heaney. To honour such inheritance requires all the confidence and care of a high-wire act . . . Morrissey is more than up to the task.

The Guardian - Paul Batchelor

Parallax is something of a treasure trove . . . Morrissey's poetic framings and exposures of author, reader/viewer, and object in dynamic and angular relation to each other make her a compelling advocate, and exemplary practitioner, of both seeing and doing things differently.

The Guardian Fran Brearton

The outstanding poet of her generation.

The Independent - Stephen Knight