Sinead Morrissey

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.

And Selected Poems

Parallax

Lavinia Greenlaw

Simon Armitage

Frances Leviston

Wendy Cope

Seamus Heaney

Carol Ann Duffy

Patience Agbabi

Tony Harrison

As part of a unique collaboration between the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House, 14 leading poets were invited to respond to three great masterpieces by the Renaissance painter, Titian.

Poems Inspired by Titian

Metamorphosis

Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinéad Morrissey's sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland - the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane - celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in 'Articulation' we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon s horse, Marengo, 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz', suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'.

On Balance

Sinead Morrissey

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