Sinéad Morrissey

Life
1972- ; b. Portadown; several times winner of Irish Schools Creative Writing Award during teenage; youngest ever winner of 1990 Kavanagh Poetry Award, 1990 [aetat. 18]; issued There wasa Fire in Vancouver (1996); Between Here and There (2002), winner of the Rupert & Eithne Strong Award, 2002; also 58pp.; The State of the Prisons (2005), which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times and Poetry Now Prize (Dún Loaghaire), 2006; she has lived New Zealand and Japan; settled in Belfast; read her poetryu at the 2nd British & Irish Contemp. Poetry Conference, QUB 2010.

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Works
Poetry
  • There was a Fire in Vancouver (Manchester: Carcanet 1996), 64pp.;
  • Between Here and There (Manchester: Carcanet Press 2002), 58pp.;
  • The State of the Prisons (Manchester: Carcanet 2005), 80pp.
Fiction
  • In My Sister’s Shoes (Penguin Ireland 2007), 320pp.
Miscellaneous
  • “Her First Communion”. poem incl. in A Conversation Piece, ed. Adrian Rice & Angela Reid (Nat. Museums & Galleries of N. Ireland [2002]), rep. in The Irish Times (29 June 2002).

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Listen to Sinead Morrissey reading “The Flight of the Heart” by Louis MacNeice at the MacNeice Conference (QUB Sept. 2007) online; accessed 29.09.2010.)
—Also, her own poems:  
            “Through the Square Window”
                   “Found Architecture”
                           “The Nightwatch”
                                    “The Clangers”
link*
*link broken at 02.02.2011  

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Criticism
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)’, in Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer 2008), pp.249-86; Michael Parker, ‘“Neither Here Nor There”: New Generation Northern Irish Poets (Sinead Morrissey and Nick Laird)’, in Irish Literature Since 1990: Diverse Voices, ed. Scott Brewster & Michael Parker (Manchester UP 2009) [Chap. 8].

Reviews
Katie Donovan, ‘You Could Do Poetry’, in The Irish Times (17 Oct. 1995); Selina Guinness, review of Between Here and There, in The Irish Times (8 June 2002), Weekend; Fiona Sampson, review of The State of the Prisons [ et al.], in The Irish Times (11 June 2005), Weekend, p.11 [extract].

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Commentary
Fiona Sampson, review of The State of the Prisons [ et al.], in The Irish Times (11 June 2005), Weekend, p.11: ‘Some of this splendour comes from its subject matter: as well as the historical poems the cover blurb chooses to highlight, this is a collection stuffed with the booty of travel both actual (to China , over the Gobi Desert ) and imagined (a Polar region inhabited by a lover after Brecht, the Macedonia of Alexander the Great). / It’s far from self-congratulatory travelogue, though. Morrissey’s is a travelling intelligence which acknowledges its own implication in a world riven with international affairs. /In “Praise Of Salt” gives us the “cut and lash / of voices pitched to shatter glass” as the poet shakes salt, that Biblical mineral of life, over her breakfast egg while listening to news from the war in Iraq . / If this sounds cosy, it isn’t. Morrissey’s egg quietly debunks the comfort of our Western liberal consensus. And this dangerous quietness works as intensifier throughout the book. The source of nocturnal worries is “Sometimes childlessness, stretching out into the ether / like a plane”. Apparently effortless understatement - there’s nothing emotionally “splashy” about this image of a hurt which goes on “unto all generations” - is in fact perfectly controlled, down to the omission of the final full-stop, which keeps it limitless. / Elsewhere, “Migraine” inhabits the horror of the Moscow theatre siege with a doubled vividness: “a tangle of darkness like a Rorschach blot / where his expression had been, opening inward ...”. Another persona poem, “Stepfather”, gives us New Zealand with odd echoes of Australian Les Murray ‘s jaunty modernist astonishment. [...; &c..]’

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