The Guardian Reviews Forward Prize-Winner Sinéad Morrissey's On Balance

At The Guardian, Kate Kellaway looks into Sinéad Morrissey's latest collection, On Balance, which won the 2017 Forward Prize. As Kellaway notes, it's "a collection that keeps extending itself and that shares many of the satisfactions of fiction, memoir and history" which includes "an especially arresting poem about a model of Napoleon’s horse, another fine poem about the aviator Lilian Bland and an astounding poem based on a garish photograph of tsarist Russia)." Let's learn more from there: 

Even the poems that cross the finishing line with a flourish are open-ended, leaving one with the sense that there will always be more to say, and this is because Morrissey is possessed of her own invigorating brand of Irish fluency and an imagination that never closes.

On the subject of balance – there is always the likelihood that the world is about to tilt. The Millihelen (the poem that launches the collection) means (I had to look it up) “a unit measure of pulchritude, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship”. A natural performer on the page, Morrissey holds us here with a feat of suspension, of literary engineering. This is a phenomenal performance: a single sentence, no full stops, a steady push out into the water – I take liberties in interrupting its flow to lift out these lines:

grandstand of iron palace of rivets starts
moving starts slippery-sliding down
slow as a snail at first in its viscous passage
taking on slither and speed gathering in
the Atlas-capable weight of its own momentum
tonnage of grease beneath to get it waterborne

She describes an event that one has witnessed but, without the detailed evidence of her poem, would have judged indescribable. She takes on the “tonnage” lightly, steering the poem to its close. But in another sense, the voyage has scarcely started. We wonder about the “ladies lining the quay in their layered drapery/touching their gloves to their lips” and their untold stories, their romances.

Read more at The Guardian.