Sinéad Morrissey (born on 24 April [1] 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh) is a poet from Northern Ireland.[2]
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In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.
The clouds above the Lough are stacked
like the clouds are stacked above Delft.
They have the glutted look of clouds over water.
The heads of the dead are huge. I wonder
if it’s my son they’re after, his
effortless breath, his ribbon of years ─
but he sleeps on unregarded in his cot,
inured, it would seem, quite naturally
to the sluicing and battering and pairing back of glass
that delivers this shining exterior …
Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast and currently lectures.
Morrissey has a distinctive enrapt style of delivery. She learns her poems by heart and presents them with a crystal sharp vocal intensity that has the power to astonish an audience.
Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for "distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work".[2] Her poem "Through the Square Window" won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition.[4] Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.[5]
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