Sinéad Morrissey Biography
Sinéad Morrissey (born on 24 April 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh) is an Irish poet. In January 2014 she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax.
Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast and currently lectures.
Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for "distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work". Her poem "Through the Square Window" won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.
In January 2014 Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax. The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was 'politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.'
In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.
...
Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley‐Croydon,
...
A soldier returned from a war
was how my P6 spelling book put it: I saw
cripples with tin cans for coins
in dusty scarlet, back from some spat of Empire.
...
In other noises, I hear my children crying -
in older children playing on the street
past bedtime, their voices buoyant
in the staggered light; or in the baby
...
That their days were not like our days,
the different people who lived in sepia -
more buttoned, colder, with slower wheels,
shut off, sunk back in the unwakeable house
for all we call and knock. And even the man
with the box and the flaming torch
who made his servants stand so still
their faces itched can't offer us what it cost
to watch the foreyard being lost
to cream and shadow, the pierced sky
placed in a frame. Irises under the windowsill
were the colour of Ancient Rome.
...
Delivering Poems Around The World
Poems are the property of their respective owners. All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge...
7/19/2025 5:11:11 AM # 1.0.0
