On Balance
Teetering on the brink of various crises, Sinead Morrissey's poems consider spectacular feats of human engineering – ships, planes, robots – from our radically unstable perspective, struggling for poise. Poems become pliable; the dead speak.
About the author
Sinead 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 now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.
Reviews
"The outstanding poet of her generation" – Stephen Knight, Independent
"In a year of brilliantly themed collections, the judges were unanimous in choosing Sinead Morrisseyas 'Parallax' as the winner. Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests" – Ian Duhig, Chair of the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize Judges
"One of the most gifted of yet another generation of talented Irish poets" – The Independent on Sunday
"In a year of brilliantly themed collections, the judges were unanimous in choosing Sinead Morrisseyas 'Parallax' as the winner. Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests" – Ian Duhig, Chair of the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize Judges
"One of the most gifted of yet another generation of talented Irish poets" – The Independent on Sunday