Through the Square Window

Avoiding the lure of the idyll - Fiona Sampson

Sinead Morrissey's Through the Square Window is already a Poetry Book Society Choice and short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize: and rightly so. This grown-up, serious volume dares, as writing in these islands rarely does, to range from European history ('a territory so seeming rich /and decorous') to motherhood, by way of speculations on the nature of Matter, and dark 'found' stories, from Arkansas or 'our back door'. Though one might expect a Belfast writer to deal with political history (is there any other kind?) and, as a woman, in family narratives, it is a mark of Morrissey's poetic authority that she gives no sense of going through the usual confessional motions. This collection is authentic, instead, to a confident, inquiring intelligence that makes itself felt on every page.
In Electric Edwardians, boldly revisiting the territory of Philip Larkin's great MCMXIV, Morrissey notices children 'simply staring back at us, across the lens's promise,