Parallax
In "Parallax" Sinead 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.
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
"In a year of brilliantly themed collections, the judges were unanimous in choosing Sinead Morrissey's 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
"The outstanding poet of her generation" – Stephen Knight, Independent
"The outstanding poet of her generation" – Stephen Knight, Independent