WINNER OF THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2013
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 FORWARD PRIZE
In Parallax Sinéad Morrissey documents what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs (the different people who lived in sepia') are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a particular perspective. Assured and disquieting, Morrissey's poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read and misread in the surfaces of the presented world.
In a year of brilliantly themed collections, the judges were unanimous in choosing Sinéad Morrissey's Parallax as the winner. Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.
Ian Duhig, Chair of the T S Eliot Prize 2013 Judges The outstanding poet of her generation. Stephen Knight, Independent***
[A beautiful cloudless morning. My toothache better - 1801] ***(Carcanet, 1 October 2013, first published 28 June 2013, ebook, 69 pages, borrowed from the National Poetry Library)
***
***
This is my first time reading a full collection by this author. I've read her work before in anthologies. I enjoyed this collection. I found the poems engrossing, rich and vivid. Many of the poems in this collection are narrative. You don't often get a lot of narrative poetry. This was a rare treat. The poems in Parallax are varied, some are very short, less than a page and others run to pages. I liked the fact each poem was different. Unfortunately, the poems did not grab my heart the way some poetry does. Parallax is a strong collection but not very special. I enjoyed Shadows, The Evil Key and The House of Osiris in the Field of Reeds the most.
