Sinead Morrissey "Parallax" wins Poetry Prize

[Maud Fitch]

Congratulations to Belfast's first poet laureate, Sinéad Morrissey, who has won this year's TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, which is considered to be the most prestigious poetry award in Britain. Morrissey joins the ranks of such luminaries as Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott with her award winning many-angled, any-angled poetry collection, "Parallax".

In "Parallax" Sinead 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.

[FNAWrite]

I am very surprised that Belfast had no poet laureate until the 21st century.