Parallax

Sinead Morrissey

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781847772046
• eBook ISBN: 9781847774422
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

WINNER OF THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2013SHORTLISTED 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

Daughter

after Robert Pinsky

I

She wakes at 7am—

her internal clock

unstintingly accurate—

and can sleep twelve hours

at a stretch without

losing hold of her last thought.

The grievance she fell

asleep with: you didn’t

get me rice milk or

you didn’t sing me

song ’bout Tommy Thumb—

her dawn declaration.

Though she’ll also ask

is it morning?

just to check

she hasn’t missed

the best and purest

portion of her day, the bit

with her brother and breakfast

in it, by being away.

II

The dresses and tops

in her wardrobe

smell of fabric conditioner—

sugar, vanilla, baking soda—

and are frequently washed.

The clothes she harries

off and leaves in heaps

on stairs and sofas

so she can flash

about the house

with nothing on—

a moon-pale, decelerating

balloon—recall whiskey:

layered, earthy, consisting

of neither sweat nor

excrement but of what

her deeper body’s left

behind itself in warmth.

I cannot tell the strands

of it apart.

III

Cut off by the Atlantic,

half her family

are permanently absent

though she hasn’t

noticed this yet.

Her world is still

the roof over ‘safe’

in the Japanese pictograph.

Her fiercest, non-human

attachments are to

vibrantly coloured objects

—orange plate, red fork—

she cannot eat without.

She’s learning this house

like a psalm: the crack

in the kitchen sink,

the drawers and all

their warring contents,

the geography of each room

immutable as television.

IV

When visitors come

she’s keen to show them

the most horrific thing

she knows: Rien Poortvliet’s

picture of a Snotgurgle

in the Bantam Book of Gnomes.

Scabrous, radically

lopsided, huge—

he’s forcing a gnome

through a mangle

while his sidekick-

black rat laughs. The book

falls open at his face.

She might be Persephone,

bravely showing off

what she’s survived,

but it’s probably the snot

she’s more delighted by:

the viscous, glittering rivulets

he hasn’t wiped away.

V

In Timothy Leary’s

eight-circuit system

of human evolution

there’s a drug for every stage.

Acquiring language

or the Symbol State

(concerning it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Epigraph
• 1801
• Baltimore
• Shadows
• Shostakovich
• Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg
• Home Birth
• A Day’s Blindness
• Display
• Fur
• Fool’s Gold
• Jigsaw
• Puzzle
• Photographing Lowry’s House
• Migraine
• Daughter
• V is for Veteran
• Last Winter
• A Matter of Life and Death
• Signatures
• Through the Eye of a Needle
• The Doctors
• The Evil Key
• Yard Poem
• Lighthouse
• The Coal Jetty
• ‘Ladies in Spring’ by Eudora Welty
• The Mutoscope
• The House of Osiris in the Field of Reeds
• The Party Bazaar
• The High Window
• Peacocks and Butterflies
• A Lie
• Blog
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Sinéad Morrissey from Carcanet Press
• Copyright