Parallax

Belfast's first poet laureate, Sinéad Morrissey, has a voice that is both sharp and quietly close. Her 2013 collection Parallax took the T. S. Eliot Prize, and its poems ask what gets lost when a house, a street or a city is fixed in a single moment by a camera or by a poem. Those frozen scenes come with the viewpoint of whoever made them, and the book turns over the figures on the margins of such images, from domestic servants to people who undermine the order around them, asking whom the picture leaves out.

Rather than settling on answers, Morrissey dwells on the paradoxes that arise whenever we try to hold onto passing experience through art. The poems are restless and exact, and they keep returning to the gap between the moment as it was lived and the version that survives.

This edition also gathers poems from Morrissey's earlier books, appearing in the United States for the first time. Their range of subjects and forms shows how her work developed, and it demonstrates the technical control and tenderness that run through her writing.