Between Here and There

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinéad Morrissey was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdańsk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Sinéad Morrissey is a frequent contributor to PN Review.Author photo credit: Clare Bowles

"Sinead Morrissey's sequence about Japan must be read by everyone who loves poetry." - The Daily Telegraph."Her poems have a tough, edgy, fearless, down-to-earth feel - some of them contain a young woman's anger; all of them show that Sinead misses very little." - Lindsay Fulcher, The Lady, 8th October 2002."The confidence in what Sinead sees and feels is fully and convincingly dramatized in these poignant and astute poems. They have a quite mesmeric tone of voice and an unmistakable point from which she makes us see what she means. Take, for instance, her poem, 'This Century, the Next, The Last'. A perfectly poised lyric if ever there was one. Ms Morrissey is a very fine poet and I am delighted to select hers as the winning submission from such an impressive group of her peers." - Gerald Dawe, Director of Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, on awarding Morrissey the Rupert and Eithne Strong Poetry Award, 2002."Things could hardly be going better for this young scribe, but Sinead is not one to rest on her laurels." - Una Bradley, The Belfast Telegraph, 2002."A closing sequence of 14 poems about Japan point out the juxtaposition of the ritual and the new in temples and TV towers, rice paddies and spreading dormitories, resisting the oriental so as to see a no less astonishing, but infinitely harsher, society. Festivals and delicate calligraphy reveal a frightening and chaotic brutality beneath the colourful dancers and delicacy of line. Morrissey's voice is difficult to describe fully: if at times it is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop in its sense of place, its colloquial mode of address and the sense of personal threat mixed with the eager embrace of the alien and strange is uniquely disconcerting - hints of Michael Lowry perhaps...two of the most convincing, '& Forgive Us Our Trespasses' and 'Sea Stones' are shockingly candid, memorable analyses of the hurt caused by a love affair. These two poems, along with the soft stillness of 'On Waitakere Dam', show Morrissey at her most powerful when least showy in syntax and gesture." - Selina Guinness, The Irish Times, 8th June 2002."She communicates a real, angry love for Belfast in the opening poem, and her Japan sequence is full of an ambiguous fascination with the darker underside of that country. She has a command of long lines that makes me envious, and a delight in language that makes the best of these poems a joy to read. There are echoes here of Louis MacNeice, especially in the earlier poems, but Morrissey's is a very distinctive voice and one to look out for. Like all good writing, there is much to chew over there. Recommended." - Steven Waling, City Life Manchester, 6th March 2002.