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Sinead MorrisseySinead Morrissey
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Critical perspective
BiographyPoet Sinéad Morrissey was born on 24 April 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996); Between Here and There (2002); The State of the Prisons (2005); and Through the Square Window (2009). Three of these collections have been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
She was the 2002 Poetry International Writer in Residence at the Royal Festival Hall and is currently Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast. Having lived and worked in Japan and New Zealand, she now lives in Northern Ireland. She was selected by the British Council to take part in the Writers' Train Project in China in 2003.
In 2007 she was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Poetry
BibliographyThere Was Fire in Vancouver Carcanet, 1996 Between Here and There Carcanet, 2002 The State of the Prisons Carcanet, 2005 Through the Square Window Carcanet, 2009
Prizes and awards1990 Patrick Kavanagh Award 1996 Eric Gregory Award 2002 Arts Council Macaulay Fellowship 2002 Rupert and Eithne Strong Trust Award 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Between Here and There 2005 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize (shortlist) The State of the Prisons 2005 Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) The State of the Prisons 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlst) Through The Square Window
Critical PerspectiveJust looking at the covers of Sinead Morrissey’s two poetry collections, There was Fire in Vancouver (1996) and Between Here and There (2002), is enough to take the hint about her underlying concerns; one shows a modern stained-glass window, the other a painting of a girl wearing a Communion dress. She has indeed latterly developed quasi-religious themes, but Morrissey’s poetry is very much ‘in the world’, and she herself (if her poems ‘Among Communists’ and ‘CND’ are autobiographical) was raised in a household more attuned to politics than religion. Northern Ireland forms both the topographical and emotional backdrop to her work: ‘It’s as though the angels are angry, sitting in the sky / With heads in hands and howling it out all over us’ (‘Belfast Storm’). Living in Belfast until the age of 18, in 1990, her childhood coincided with the height of ‘the Troubles’ and its sectarian and political conflicts. While she has since travelled the world, teaching in Japan for an extended period, and also visiting America, New Zealand, and China, she has returned to the city to be the current Poet in Residence at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Morrissey is part of a young generation of poets now coming into prominence, who were students together during the early 1990s at Trinity College, Dublin, including Justin Quinn, David Wheatley, and Caitriona O’Reilly. Like them, she publishes with some regularity in magazines such as PN Review, Metre and Poetry Review. Medbh McGuckian has perhaps provided her with an example, but she has acknowledged a particular indebtedness to the Welsh poet and cleric R.S. Thomas, who inspired her, she wrote ‘because he is absolutely faithful to his own poetic concerns, regardless of a predominantly atheistic environment and changing literary fashions’. If Thomas is alive in her work, then arguably so is the American poet Elizabeth Bishop - an influential figure for many current women poets. Of Bishop, the critic Helen Vendler observed that she ‘staked out travel, in all its symbolic reaches of pilgrimage, exile, homelessness, exploration, exhaustion, colonializing, mapping, and being lost’. Such terms perhaps help us to understand Morrissey’s work.
Of There was Fire in Vancouver, Michael Schmidt wrote that the book is ‘organized around journeys: from communion to spiritual affirmation; from life in Ireland to life abroad, and return’. It opens with poems about her politicized childhood, ‘Nine years old and filled to the brim / With my parents’ demands for peace’ (‘CND’). The Troubles are never far away: ‘Ciara’ is a child’s eye-view of a victim, when her family outing at Christmas leads to finding a relative crying over potatoes: ‘Something easier for her to articulate / Than the mess of love and various motherhood, / Than the son who had his knees blown somewhere else’. In ‘Saturday’, there are ‘kids on the street / Throwing stones; and an explosion is ‘a hard truth to have to take in the face - / You wake up one morning with your windows / Round your ankles and your forehead billowing smoke’ (‘Europa Hotel’). ‘Thoughts in a Black Taxi’ concludes with the statement, ‘I always walked with my heart constricting, / Half-expecting bottles, in sudden shards / Of West Belfast sunshine, / To dance about my head’. Her spiritual dimension starts to emerge towards the end of the book, albeit obliquely, ‘With all the improbables cajoled / Into truth, we are not as far out / From faith as we were’ (‘The Juggler’). The final poem envisions a beach facing the North Sea: ‘It is as though God said / Let there be light in this world / Of nothing let it come from / Nothing let it speak nothing / Let it go everywhere’ (‘Restoration’).
Between Here and There (2002) was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize and marks a significant development. Her motifs of travel and journeys are carried much further, especially in an extended sequence about her stay in Japan. This first appeared in the 1999 Carcanet anthology New Poetries II, and was praised by Grey Gowrie in the Daily Telegraph, while Stephen Knight identified her ‘clear eye for detail and, predominantly, a long line that never quite crumbles into prose - result[ing] in an engrossing, intense poetry’. This applies particularly to some enigmatic poems of cultural disorientation: ‘I mistook the black fish for an oriental goldfish the flash of gold / on its belly meant it carried its message for the element below it / always one storey down Zen masters attaining one storey down and I, / falling into you, story by story, coming to rest in the place where closing eyes is to see’ (‘Goldfish’). In the title poem, she visits temples, seeing stone babies ‘wrapped up to the throat in teddy bears and trains’, then a graveyard for miscarriages, and finally Japan’s greatest Buddha: ‘His lily flower opened. / His crossing was a falling into light. / Fall with me, he says, and you’ll be raised to the heights / of the roof of the biggest wooden building in the world.’ In ‘To Imagine an Alphabet’, she practices calligraphy: ‘There are stories in skeletons/ And after the three fluid / Lines that are Mountain, the four / That are Fire, Ice as a stroke / On the left side of Water - / Problem is Tree in a Box’. The final poem is a strange vision of her mother as a king’s daughter, ‘without a body, watching the ends of vision dissolve’, but concludes with rational statement: ‘An aeroplane thrown by lightning, a love affair, a woman with Greek hair, a crab’s personality, / an alphabet, a barricaded nation, the spirit of correction, two years at sea. / These are the things that bring me to this country, and just like then / whole days dissolve to distance’ (‘Pearl’).
The volume starts off, however, ‘In Belfast’, where she has returned after ten years away: ‘Here the seagulls stay in off the Lough all day. / Victoria Regina steering the ship of the City Hall/ in this the first and last of her intense provinces’. ‘Unabashedly, this is our splintered city’, but she observes it beginning to change, as tourists ‘are landing in airports / and filing out of ships’. Morrissey enters more intimate territory, with ambiguous musings on love such as ‘& Forgive Us Our Trespasses’ (‘Of which the first is love’) and death: ‘It came to me the day I stole communion in the cathedral, / not knowing what to do and squinting wildly, / that I had need of a funeral’. The scenes shift to Arizona (‘That high up, stars hurt like showering flint’) and New Zealand: ‘At night, / with no lights for miles, the lake / would glitter with the Southern Cross’ (‘On Waitakere Dam’). She also finds the spiritual in nature, as within a humble rock pool, its creatures living ‘on faith’. ‘Life flourishes on belief - / it announces quietly how, some day or night, the sea will arrive and save them / from the starfish-seeking children and evaporation. / How they would shine in a parable on the return of Christ’. Sinead Morrissey’s poems explore unusual depths, and, whatever their concerns and settings, are quietly evocative.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
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