About the Book
An Irish Times Book of the Year 2017
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’.
About the Author :
Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinéad Morrissey was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdańsk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Sinéad Morrissey is a frequent contributor to PN Review.
Review :
'Morrissey is possessed of her own invigorating brand of Irish fluency and an imagination that never closes.'
Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
'Poet Sinéad Morrissey gains power with each collection. She's one of those generous writers whose images and structures open so invitingly that your response is to grab a pen and write back to her: in other words, an inspiration.'
Hilary Mantel, from the TLS 'Books of the Year 2017'
'I can't not mention Sinéad Morrissey - a wide-ranging, capacious, brilliant and entirely satisfying collection of poems that will be read many decades hence.'
Andrew Marr, from the New Statesman 'Books of the Year 2017'
'On Balance demonstrates that poems, far from being an obsolete technology, were never just mnemonic machines in the first place: they were always simply the perfect instrument for human voices, both living and (un)dead.'
Ange Mlinko, LRB
'I've always leaned on poetry as something more thrilling than...well, almost anything - religion, for instance. The older I get, the more essential poetry seems and, alas, the converse for the latter. Two books from this year give further proof of this: Sinéad Morrissey's starry poetic engineering in On Balance (Carcanet) and Michael Longley's angelic Angel Hill (Jonathan Cape), which was also proof, maybe, that Homer never died. Northern Ireland's poets continue to outstare miserable politics and offer instead the better firearms of beauty and truth.'
Sebastian Barry, from the New Statesman 'Books of the Year 2017'
'The poem Nativity, if it stood alone, makes Sinead Morrissey's On Balance a sweet Christmas choice, but it is only one of a number of thought-provoking poems in her sixth, prize-winning collection. Morrissey floats the reader glimpses of desires unmet, memories still fluid; the stories swim beyond the edge of the page, buoyed up by possibility.'
Hilary Mantel, from the Guardian 'Books of the Year' 2017
'Sinead Morrissey's On Balance was a worthy winner of the 2017 Forward Prize. A celebration of resourcefulness, from motherhood to the first woman to build an aeroplane, its language is as poised as the acrobats it catches.'
Jeremy Noel-Tod, from the Sunday Times Book of the Year 2017
'Morrissey's clarity and confidence mean that On Balance approaches each of her subjects with great fluency and command.'
The Irish Times
'Sinead Morrissey's On Balance is a book of poetry that embraces the art of fiction, and that makes you think about the world being off kilter, of suspension, of what might be required to have balance. Amazing. And the deserving winner of the Forward Prize this year.'
Scottish Makar Jackie Kay, Herald Scotland Books of the Year 2017
'A game-changing volume of poems in her shining career.'
Damian Smyth, Head of Drama and Literature at Arts Council Northern Ireland, Belfast Telegraph
'Northern Irish poetry looks like it's about to take centre stage again, and the woman leading the charge is Sinead Morrissey.'
Cork Evening Echo Best Books of 2017
'Propulsive, compelling, melding narrative and lyric, Morrissey's poetry combines deep feeling with a probing, philosophical intelligence.'
The Poetry Review
