Parallax: And Selected Poems

by Sinéad Morrissey

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

Only for you do the two mute girls on stage
who falter at first, erratic as static

in the synaptic gap between each image,
imperceptibly jolt to life-
grinning, tap-dancing, morphing into footage,

their arms like immaculate pistons, their legs
like knives . . .
It lasts a minute, their having-been-written
onto light.
-from "The Mutoscope"

Sinéad Morrissey is one of the most fascinating talents in international poetry. Recently appointed as 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 explores 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 Morrissey's own selection of her favorite poems from her 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.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Hardcover

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.

[Gabriella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its poetry books like these do you wish there was a secret sixth star you could add to your rating.

Not only does Sinead Morissey bring the rawness of the human experience into her prose, but she does it artfully and subtly. You do not realize the genius you are reading until your fifth poem. The only reason this book took me so long to finish was because I wanted to savor the experience of reading this poetry in the settings it deserved to be read in. Rarely do I give poetry a full five stars, or anything really, but I truly have no critiques for her work, only praise.

If you're stuck in your poetry or feel your prose needs a breath of crisp spring water this is the book I would pick up. I've already noticed a difference in my prose through the power of osmosis. And this book in particular gives such a range of work from different stages of life it truly made me feel small in a big world.

I look forward to keeping an eye out for the author's work in bookstores to see what else there is to discover.

[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.

[Giulia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Her collection, Parallax, was actually my least favorite of all of the collections. Nearly every poem seemed like a clipped, intimate fragment of her life turned poetic using abstract prose.

I think her poetry is strongest when she gives herself more breadth to work with. I greatly enjoyed “And Forgive Us Our Trespasses,” “In Need of a Funeral” (the two most early poems that drew me into reading the whole collection), and “Don Juan.” The rest melded together into an unidentifiable, murky blur.

[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!