Description
Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award. 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, Sinead 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'.
About the Author
Sinead 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 now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.
Reviews
'The outstanding poet of her generation.' - Stephen Knight, Independent
Awards
Winner of Poetry Book Society (PBS): Choice - Summer 2017 and The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017 and The Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award 2020. Short-listed for The Pigott Poetry Prize 2018 and The Costa Poetry Award 2017.
Book Information
ISBN 9781784103606
Author Sinead Morrissey
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 7mm
About the Author
Sinead 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 now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.
Reviews
'The outstanding poet of her generation.' - Stephen Knight, Independent
Awards
Winner of Poetry Book Society (PBS): Choice - Summer 2017 and The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017 and The Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award 2020. Short-listed for The Pigott Poetry Prize 2018 and The Costa Poetry Award 2017.
Book Information
ISBN 9781784103606
Author Sinead Morrissey
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 7mm
