On Balance

Sinead Morrissey

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784103606
• eBook ISBN: 9781784103613
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award

Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award

Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize

Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinéad Morrissey's sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland - the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane - celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in 'Articulation' we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon s horse, Marengo, 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz', suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'.

PERFUME

1

23 May 1963

My Great Auntie Winnie may as well have spotted a crack

in the floor of Nottingham’s Odeon Cinema –

beginning under the stage

like a telltale hairline fissure in a dam face

then zigzagging towards the exit –

as have been struck

by the actual bellwether that assailed her

the morning she trudged in to sweep and mop

and dust the flip-back seats

after the pop music concert the night before:

not just the common-enough stench of smoke

and sweat, but an extra still-warm

acrid musk, the mixed-in fug of a stable

in summer heat, hitting her like the reek

of a hospital laundry,

because in answer to Love Me Do, offered up

in spectacular harmony, two hundred

fourteen-year-old girls

had instantly wet themselves, screaming Yes!

We love you already!, but inaudibly,

each lone voice hopeless

against the squealing sheetmetal square of noise,

and so their bodies had taken over,

take this river, each shower a gift,

intimate and articulate, to whichever identikit member

they’d pinned their collapsing

stomachs on, each stream of steaming

yellow a flower, and as the crack grew ever wider

and plaster flakes abandoned the ceiling

and covered my Auntie’s rollered

hair, she suddenly saw the street outside

divide the length of the fissure, then the city,

the north, the south, then all of England,

mothers on one side, daughters on the other,

and the chasm between them strung

with brilli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• The Millihelen
• At the Moscow State Circus
• On Balance
• Receiving the Dead
• Platinum Anniversary
• Nativity
• At the Balancing Lakes
• Perfume
• Tribute
• Collier
• My Seventeenth-Century Girlhood
• The Mayfly
• My Life According to You
• Articulation
• Das Ding an Sich
• The Singing Gates
• Colour Photographs of Tsarist Russia
• Meteor Shower
• Whitelessness
• The Wheel of Death
• Very Dyspraxic Child
• The Rope
• From The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Also by Sinéad Morrissey
• Copyright