Poetry Review: Sinéad Morrissey

By Sibhéal McGarry

Sinéad Morrissey was born on the 24^th of April 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh. She is undoubtedly a very successful poet, having won many litigious awards for her poetry, such as the T.S Eliot Prize for her collection of poems entitled The Parallax. 

Her other accolades include winning The Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1990, where she remains the youngest recipient of the award, having received it when she was only eighteen years old. 

In 1996, she would go on to receive The Eric Gregory Award (an award established by the society of authors), which supports young poets in the United Kingdom. 

In 2005, she would win The Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, although it is not specified for which piece of poetry she would win the award. 

In 2007, she won the National Poetry Competition for her achingly melancholic poem ‘Through the Square Window’. 

In 2010, she won The Irish Times Poetry Now Award for a celebration of her complete poetry collection. 

Furthermore, she would go on to win The Forward Prize for Poetry for her thought-provoking sixth poetry collection named On Balance in 2017.

She has released six collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver, Between Here and There, The State of the Prisons, Through the Square Window, The Parallax and On Balance.

Although born in Portadown, she was raised in Belfast, which was reflected heavily in her own work. She would attend Trinity College Dublin where she would receive her BA and later, PhD. An avid traveller, she would go to live in China, New Zealand, and Japan. It was in Japan that she would meet her husband, with whom she shares two children.

She would return to Belfast and become Writer-in Residence at Queen’s University Belfast in 2002. She was involved heavily in the Seamus Heaney Centre, becoming Reader in Creative Writing. 

In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, she recounts her shock and sadness, when the news of Seamus Heaney’s death reached her. Heaney was unquestionably one of the greatest poets of our time. He inspired individuals both far and wide with his elegantly rendered prose. His death was a great tragedy, but his legacy will live on in the works of the new generation such as Morrissey.

She would be appointed as Belfast’s first poet laureate in 2013, by the then Lord Mayor Mairtín Ó Muilleoir. 

She was granted the position of Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle in 2016.

‘Genetics’ is a poem from her The State of the Prisons collection released in 2005.

The poem, intertwined with spoken rhyme, details how familial traits link us all to our family lines. The persona details how her hands link her now separated parents, suggesting that she is acting as a vessel, which keeps them forever connected to each other.

The poem is made up of six stanzas, consisting of tercets (excluding the last stanza which is a quatrain). The rhyme scheme is ABA creating quite a terse upbeat stanza.

In the second stanza we are told that they are ‘repelled to separate lands’ but that ‘they touch where fingers link to palms’. The persona remains as the last connection between her mother and father. The verb ‘repelled’ creates quite distinct vitriol between the two individuals and their dislike for one another is perhaps lost on the persona, who is recounting their separation with a childlike innocence.  The latter half of the stanza contains many parallelisms to Act 1 Scene 5 in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

Romeo. [To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo. Have not saints’ lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo. O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

The idea that the persona’s parents are star-crossed lovers instead of two people who have sadly fallen out of love, is further reinforced in the fourth stanza. The persona steeples her fingers together to make a chapel and re-enacts their wedding, using their hands.

The narration detailing her parents’ love shifts to the persona addressing their own lover by the use of the personal pronoun ‘you’. The persona promises to ‘bequeath’ their fingers if their lover bestows their palms. In this way, the persona thus cements their wish to have children of their own.

Edited by Tiffany Murnaghan

• ‘Genetics’ can be read online at: Genetics – Sinéad Morrissey – Ireland – Poetry International.