On Balance

Overview

 Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom. Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award.  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".

Reviews

"The outstanding poet of her generation." —Stephen Knight, The Independent

"In a year of brilliantly themed collections, the judges were unanimous in choosing Sinéad Morrissey's Parallax as the winner. Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests." —Ian Duhig, Chair of the 2013 T S Eliot Prize Judges

"One of the major rewards of The State of the Prisons lies in the way Morrissey makes her poetic machines work and ride: in her formal risk, not least the outrageousness and enchantment of her rhymes, but also the occasional pushed-to-the-brink line-lengths, some of which feel like walking the plank with the eye. You have to trust her." —The Guardian on The State of the Prisons 

"It is, in short, a book of splendours." —The Irish Times on Through the Square Window

Author Biography

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and was a lecturer in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.