Found Architecture: Selected Poems

by Sinéad Morrissey

Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2021

A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020

An Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year 2020

Sinéad Morrissey has published six celebrated collections of poetry. This Selected Poems reveals how she has developed formally and thematically from the precocious and carefully considered first book, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to the most recent and highly praised, On Balance (2017).

There is throughout Morrissey's work a civic her imagination is dynamically peopled, as are her various landscapes and sense of history, and she is drawn to the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of all human intention and inquiry, as well as to celebrating individual women and men and the things they create or unleash. There is always a paradox which she enters and explores, making it luminous but never resolving it. For Morrissey, each poem becomes a word-space in which readers are set free on their own journey of discovery.

Genres: Poetry

263 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 30, 2020

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

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morrissey is one of my favorite poets. Period. Born April 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh in Northern Ireland, her parents were Communists and active in the Ban the Bomb movement. born 24 April 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh). In January 2014 she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collectionParallax and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance.

Her selected poems span about 25 years (she started young), and her breadth is amazing, and at the same time coherent. She doesn't jump from topic to topic, but rather, she has a mind that is so curious about so many things - history (that of her city Belfast, and that of England during the time of Cromwell), nature, motherhood, and despite the span of topics, there is a depth and dedication found in each of her poems that is captivating.

She is a poet who is as likely to recite her poems as to read them. She draws you in, and I encourage you to look for videos of her reading. She is not just a poet for women. She embodies the vision of the late Eavan Boland who advocated for her entire career for poetry to make room for more women. This wish is coming to fruition and if you read Morrissey's poems in this collection, I am sure you will see the time for women to be heard is not only here, but welcome.

[Iulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sinéad Morrissey: 🙌 🙌 🙌

Favourites - to be read over and over:

"& Forgive Us Our Trespasses"
"In Need of a Funeral"
"Genetics"
"China"
"Found Architecture"
"Ice"
"Through the Square Window"
"Platinum Anniversary"
"Whitelessness"