Parallax: And Selected Poems

by Sinéad Morrissey

A T. S. Eliot Prize–winning collection from one of Ireland's major contemporary poets
( Astron .) Apparent displacement, or difference in the apparent position, of an object, caused by actual change (or difference) of position of the point of observation. (OED)

In Parallax Sinéad Morrissey documents what is caught, 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, Morrissey's poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read, and misread in the surfaces of the presented world.

Genres: Poetry

225 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 12, 2015

About the author

Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast and currently lectures.

Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for "distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work". Her poem "Through the Square Window" won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.

Reviews

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the January/February 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Jai Hamid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through the Square Window

In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.

the clouds above the Lough are stacked
like the clouds are stacked above Delft.
They have the glutted look of clouds over water.

The heads of the dead are huge. I wonder
if it’s my son they’re after, his
effortless breath, his ribbon of years-

but he sleeps on unregarded in his cot,
inured, it would seem, quite naturally
to the sluicing and battering and parting back of glass

that delivers this shining exterior
One blue boy holds a rag in his teeth
between panes like a conjuror.

And then, as suddenly as they came, they go.
And there is a horizon
from which only the clouds stare in,

the massed canopies of Hazelbank,
the severed tip of the Strangford Peninsula,
and a density in the room I find it difficult to breathe in

until I wake, flat on my back with a cork
in my mouth, stopper-bottled, in fact,
like a herbalist’s cure for dropsy.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked many of the poems contained in this collection -- Morrissey can be very lyrical without being overly romantic or oblique. I did feel that the strength of the writing tended to decline in the excerpts from more recent volumes, though it's hard to say exactly why. Overall enjoyable, regardless.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrics of the mundane that bring beauty and mobility to the daily mind. Morrissey is a gracious heir to Eavan Boland's mixture of talents.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the best opening lines i've ever read, and lines found within I think will be going into some of the first centos I will dare to write. Striking!

[lyra button · Rating 4 out of 5]

'he becomes half man, half vine, asphyxiating. The word itself has a click in it. It halts before the ending'
afhgh what- like insanely clever