Through the Square Window by Sinéad Morrissey
Carcanet, £9.95
Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1972, brought up in Belfast and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002) and The State of the Prisons (2005), the last two of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. After spending several years abroad, in New Zealand and Japan, she is now back home in Ireland, lecturing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.
She wrote the first poem for this collection when she was pregnant with her son and the last when her daughter was two weeks old: “It encompasses the intensity of early parenthood, which I had to be true to, as the new touchstone of my life.” It also encompasses her own childhood; family stories, about deaths as well as births; and myths and dreams about conception.
Morrissey has a good eye and a good ear – “a white yacht leans on the breeze” – and the best poems – such as Storm, Ice, Fairground Music and A Device for Monitoring Brain Activity by Shining Light into the Pupil – positively fizz with fresh ideas and images: “The tree looked like a crocodile’s ribcage / as I passed along the perimeter, or the wide-propped / jawbone of a whale. Until it became, the further / I walked, a canoe, asleep on the water and fettered // with algae.”
She hears “the distant hoof beats of a heart” and spots children “staring back at us, across the lens’ promise, / as though we still held Passchendaele in our pockets.” Out of her window she can see “if I crane my neck” Belfast Lough which forms a visual and emotional backdrop to this book: “Across the Lough / – if only for a moment – hillsides / snided in gorse bushes crackled and sang.”
There are a couple of dud moments – York isn’t so much a “found poem”, as she calls it, as a list of medieval guilds – and she does like to show off her vocabulary drawn from some of the dustier parts of the dictionary – meniscus, homunculus, infusoria – but those are minor quibbles. Mostly this is a magnificent achievement; Morrissey’s imagination, married to her emotional honesty and technical virtuosity – Vanity Fair, in the form of a letter from Amelia Sedley to William Dobbin, is a particularly clever poem – means that this year she might get off the shortlist and on to the winner’s podium.
Keith Richmond
