Through the Square Window

Morrissey Sinead

Sinead Morrissey's fourth collection explores fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood in poems that are by turns tender, exuberant and unsettling. Pitched against the envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts – from Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll's Alice – that amplify her theme. Infancy is for Morrissey the rich and contested territory in which what it means to be human in a precarious world is disclosed.

About the Author

Sinead Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. Her five collections are "There Was Fire in Vancouver" (1996), "Between Here and There" (2002), "The State of the Prisons" (2005), "Through the Square Window" (2009) and the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning "Parallax" (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.

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