Between Here and There

Reviews / Votes

"Sinead Morrissey's sequence about Japan must be read by everyone who loves poetry." - The Daily Telegraph.

"Her poems have a tough, edgy, fearless, down-to-earth feel - some of them contain a young woman's anger; all of them show that Sinead misses very little." - Lindsay Fulcher, The Lady, 8th October 2002.

"The confidence in what Sinead sees and feels is fully and convincingly dramatized in these poignant and astute poems. They have a quite mesmeric tone of voice and an unmistakable point from which she makes us see what she means. Take, for instance, her poem, 'This Century, the Next, The Last'. A perfectly poised lyric if ever there was one. Ms Morrissey is a very fine poet and I am delighted to select hers as the winning submission from such an impressive group of her peers." - Gerald Dawe, Director of Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, on awarding Morrissey the Rupert and Eithne Strong Poetry Award, 2002.

"Things could hardly be going better for this young scribe, but Sinead is not one to rest on her laurels." - Una Bradley, The Belfast Telegraph, 2002.

"A closing sequence of 14 poems about Japan point out the juxtaposition of the ritual and the new in temples and TV towers, rice paddies and spreading dormitories, resisting the oriental so as to see a no less astonishing, but infinitely harsher, society. Festivals and delicate calligraphy reveal a frightening and chaotic brutality beneath the colourful dancers and delicacy of line. Morrissey's voice is difficult to describe fully: if at times it is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop in its sense of place, its colloquial mode of address and the sense of personal threat mixed with the eager embrace of the alien and strange is uniquely disconcerting - hints of Michael Lowry perhaps...two of the most convincing, '& Forgive Us Our Trespasses' and 'Sea Stones' are shockingly candid, memorable analyses of the hurt caused by a love affair. These two poems, along with the soft stillness of 'On Waitakere Dam', show Morrissey at her most powerful when least showy in syntax and gesture." - Selina Guinness, The Irish Times, 8th June 2002.

"She communicates a real, angry love for Belfast in the opening poem, and her Japan sequence is full of an ambiguous fascination with the darker underside of that country. She has a command of long lines that makes me envious, and a delight in language that makes the best of these poems a joy to read. There are echoes here of Louis MacNeice, especially in the earlier poems, but Morrissey's is a very distinctive voice and one to look out for. Like all good writing, there is much to chew over there. Recommended." - Steven Waling, City Life Manchester, 6th March 2002. Judge's comments on Sinead winning the 2002 Rupert and Eithne Strong Award:

Gerald Dawe, Director of Creative Writing, Trinity College Dublin.

'I have selected the poems of Sinead Morrissey as the winning entry: 'Stitches', 'Sea Stones', 'Eileen, Her First Communion', 'Night Drive in Four Metaphors' and 'This Century, the next, the Last', taken from her collection, Between Here and There. The confidence in what Sinead sees and feels is fully and convincingly dramatised in these poignant and astute poems. They have a quite mesmeric tone of voice and an unmistakable point from which she makes us see what she means. Take, for instance, her poem, 'This Century, the next, the Last'. A perfectly poised lyric if ever there was one. Ms Morrissey is a very fine poet and I am delighted to select hers as the winning submission from such an impressive group of her peers.' Christopher Logue on reading Sinead Morrissey's Between Here and There, 2002:

This is the real thing. Make sure you buy it.

Even if you do not read

Your children will be able to sell it

For serious pennies. ...Sinead Morrissey writes an expansive, well-travelled poetry. Her long lines reach out, striving to move beyond, to encompass. By rationing her punctuation in 'Goldfish', she heightens this effect:

I close my eyes in Gifu city I saw Japan

for the first time saw what I had seen the gate to the Nangu

shrine by the shinkansen stood straddled before my head and I

held out my hands to touch it and felt changed air

Her voice is quite unlike anything in Irish, or indeed British, poetry at present. Sinead Morrissey: between Northern Ireland and Japan.

In the early twentieth century, W.B. Yeats was the greatest Irish interpreter of Japanese culture. More than sixty years after his death, contemporary Irish writers still turn to Japan for content, form, or both. The most notable are Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paula Meehan, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Cathal O Searcaigh. Others include Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Andrew Fitzsimons, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Gabroiel Rosenstok and Joseph Woods. This remarkable list offers a variety of Irish voices, and fertile new ground for literary investigation.

Recent critical work, such as Zhaoming Qian's Orientalism and Modernism (1995) and Robert Kern's Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (1996) deal with China in English language verse. No similar recent work has focused on the Ireland-Japan connection, though in September 2002, special issue of the Journal of Irish Studies featured Japan and Ireland. My point of departure will be Mitsuko Ohno's article 'Hokusai, Basho, Zen and More. Japanese Influences on Irish Poetry.' This collection of interviews with Irish poets did not include Sinead Morrissey, whoseBetween Here and There was published in the same year.

Sinead Morrissey is writer in residence at Queen's University, Belfast. In 1995 she went to Japan and lived there for two years. The Japanese sequence of Between Here and There was inspired by this experience. Asked if Japan has affected her poetry, Morrissey replied: 'Oh yes, absolutely, when I went to live in Japan my writing changed immediately and profoundly. My line became much longer, the imagery more surreal. The poetry became a great deal more ambitious.'

The fourteen poems inspired by Japan vary in tone and subject. One of Morrissey's major concerns is with ritualism, characteristic of Buddhism and Shintoism. 'I think I was fascinated by the way so much was connected to form,' she says, 'it seemed to me that form was prioritised over content, in lots of different aspects of life, which is the opposite to the West.'

The poem 'Between Here and There' consists of four different sections. The first two deal with babies' graveyards. Section Three is centred on the Daibutsu, Japan's greatest bronze statue of Buddha. The closing image refers to the barren rituals if a Buddhist monk. The opening lines set the atmosphere of the poem: "No one seems sure of the reason why aprons / are tied to the necks of stone babies in temples" (46). Morrissey is referring to Buddhist statues usually associated with unborn babies. She would like to learn more about them, but there is no satisfactory answer to her questions. Tradition is buried in these stone figures, "squatting in Buddha-reflection."

The feeling of uncertainty is enhanced by the following image. Under Ikeda Mountain there is a graveyard for miscarriages. Looking at the stone statues, Morrissey meditates upon the inevitability of death: "A basin of stone bodies in two parts: square body, round head. / Like oriental soldiers contained by a wall, they would go walking [...] with all of the energy for life that fell out of them too soon." (46) There is something peculiar in the austerity of this cemetery. Babies are represented by stark soldiers, with no flowers or ornaments to surround them. The poet seems impressed by the composure of Japanese mourning. At the same time, she seems to suggest that suffering is culturally encoded, and cannot be reincoded in a different cultural system. Although Japanese spiritualism seems inaccessible to Morrissey, her attitude is that of a respectful observer.

From premature death, the poem moves on to Enlightenment. Morrissey refers to the Daibutsu or great Buddha, an imposing bronze figure in the Todai Temple, in Nara. This meditating Buddha is portrayed in the traditional position, sitting cross-legged. The poet speculates on the symbolism of such iconography, in which "His crossing was a falling into light." She adds an ironical touch to the words she outs on Buddha's lips: "Fall with me, he says, and you'll be raised to the heights / of the roof of the biggest wooden building in the world." Asked if she was expressing scepticism about revelation, Morrissey replied:

Sort of, it's supposed to be funny. Not expressing my scepticism about revelation, but about our own limitations I suppose. The fact that they built this huge Buddha, in the biggest wooden building in the world, to let people know about the importance of enlightenment. But because we're human beings our conceptions are still very limited. We can't help it. It's still only a wooden building after all, when we're dealing with enormities of time and spiritual wisdom that so many of us never grasp.

'Between here and There' ends with the image of a Buddhist monk, Nagasawa. He is the only human being in the poem, and is described as a man of great humanity: "When Nagasawa visits the house of the dead / he leaves at the door [...] his rockhard atheism / and slips onto the tatami of the prayer room / as the man who can chant any you-name0-it soul / between here and Ogaki to paradise." (46) Morrissey says of Nagasawa:

A Buddhist priest (but only for funerals) which he hated doing - he'd inherited a temple from his father and had to carry on the family line. He didn't really believe in an afterlife or anything, but he thought having a religious 'frame of mind' was important. [...] I loved him. He supported me endlessly.

There seems to be something in common between Nagasawa's position and Morrissey's Northern Ireland heritage. She feels the fact that both her parent s belonged to the Irish Communist Party 'contributed to a sense of dislocation, of belonging to neither community.' (2002) To be neither Catholic nor Protestant was too far removed from the dominant frame of reference. However, dislocation was only 'one side of the coin', because Morrissey's family background also left her with a sense of enormous freedom. Asked what lies 'Between Here and There', Morrissey answered: 'Nothing. It's being in between that counts. Its tolerance of transitions.'

Tolerance and openness to diversity seem to be the lens through which Morrissey filters Japan. This can be seen in the sequence of poems about Japanese festivals. 'I was very surprised by the festivals,' the poet said, 'because they were so raw and sexual and wild. It was the underside of Japan, the one still linked to village traditions connected to harvest cycles going back for centuries. I loved them.' The sequence covers the four seasons, plus an extra poems for the local festival of Ogaki. John Gillespie distinguishes between two types of festivals: 'Traditionally-held festivals are those in which Shinto deities and the people communicate through certain rites on specific dates. [...] They are held in any region of Japan where there is a shrine' (1993: 276) Festivals are also mass evens 'for commemoration and celebration' (Ibid.) and are known as matsuri.

Morrissey's five poems are concerned with the frenzy of these popular Japanese celebrations. In 'Ogaki Festival' Morrissey pictures herself so drunk, that her students hold her head as she cries. 'Spring Festival' almost reads like a dream, or a nightmare: "My body has become the body of the festival: / the vaginas on shrines reduce me to the facts of life" (49). The sexual organs are associated with fertility. In some Japanese shrines it is not unusual to see wooden sculptures of male / female genitals, commonly believed to ensure good harvest. The same symbolism can be found in the more violent 'Summer Festival': "What do you think when you see a mache vagina / being rammed with a penis as broad as a battering ram?" (50). The language is crude, in line with the orgiastic frenzy of the scene. The ritual enacts a sexual encounter, with two enormous mache organs carried around in procession.

Sex is not considered a taboo in Japan. Man has the right to search for pleasure and sexuality is celebrated by culture and religion. Ukiyo, or 'The Floating World', refers to the red-light districts legalised under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The name itself suggests that life is short, and one should enjoy it as much as possible. Tea rooms, theatres and public baths were among the most popular meeting places in the Tokugawa/Edo period. Wood-block prints (ukiyo-e) of the time show the demi-monde of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, populated by kabuki actors, "jesters, [...] bathgirls and dissolute samurai" (Stanley-Baker 1984: 188). Contemporary Japan has preserved a permissive attitude towards sex and sexuality. Asked about her reaction to Japanese eroticism, Morrissey replied:

I was shocked and puzzled, initially, but very interested in it too. It had none of the prurience of western eroticism, at least old-fashioned eroticism didn't. It didn't seem to be a sexually guilty culture in the same way as the west is.

Besides dealing with sex and birth, the sequence about festivals focuses on gender. 'Autumn Festival' is a celebration of women's power of creation: "in the streets I watch women who are dancing in rings / in the slow, hindered steps of the kimono. Again and again, / a festival of women. They are declaring what's been done" (51). In Morrissey's words: "the dancing women are linked to the land, and the land is linked to them, so their experiences conjoin. What's been done to the women has been done to the land, and vice versa." Their dancing in rings seems like a celebration of motherhood, achieved with as much sacrifice as the harvest.

'Winter Festival' is an exclusively male festival. Men drink sake to keep out of the cold, gird their loins and band on a drum in frantic excitement. The closing line casts a special light on the poem: "in the alley there's a pyramid of bright flesh and lanterns, refusing to be born." (52). Asked if this was a metaphor for winter or more than that, Morrissey replied:

It's the stalled nature of winter, the stalled nature of masculinity, which can't pass on life to another without women. [...] the festivals seemed so linked to the archetypes of male/female. Writing about them this dichotomy comes into the poems much more clearly than in my other work. I've never written as explicitly about birth and sex before.

Morrissey's poetry is multilayered. She looks at Japan with disenchanted eyes. Never disrespectful, she is not afraid of touching upon difficult issues. Spiritualism and eroticism can live side by side, she seems to believe. But if sexual activity is seen as predominantly male, motherhood is obviously exclusively female. A convinced feminist, Morrissey sees woman as Mother Earth, and contemplates unborn life with grief. The poet is not too rigid a feminist, however. She believes in the 'tolerance of opposites' embodied by Nagasawa, the atheist monk to whom sex is like Zen.

Between Here and There expresses Morrissey's concern with the Japanese language. In particular, three poems build a subtext within the text: 'To Encourage the Study of Kanji', 'Night Drive in Four Metaphors' and 'To Imagine an Alphabet.' The last two poems are both concerned with the Japanese language. Morrissey's interest focuses on the Chinese character system, which offers a 'visual understanding of language.' As she explains, 'meaning come sin flashes, rather than being linear. It's so much more intricate and beautiful and multi-dimensional than English.' This observation probably depends on the fact that, unlike other young Irish poets who have been to Japan, Morrissey studied Japanese for two years. She could follow most conversations, although she found the written system very difficult.

'Night Drive in Four Metaphors' was inspired by the geometry of the kanji system, derived from the Chinese. The poem describes a night drive in Japan. Morrissey is probably in a taxi, her fiance sitting next to her. She describes what she sees from the window. In her imagination, this landscape turns into four metaphors. The straight roads through thrice fields are compared to the line through the 'kanji or centre', "the eye of an animal skewered and shown on its side" (45). The moon "on its back, under the shadow of its circle", becomes a smile under "the weight of a cold ball breathing on it." The flats for Brazilian factory workers, with shirts hung out on balconies, are seen as "ships on a wind sea trying to sail." Finally, Morrissey thinks about how comparatively different the world looks from her boyfriend's window. The two lovers see "Two worlds split open to each other, stars spilling from each."

Referring to the kanji character system, Morrissey said: 'How solid and square and tangible that language is, because it has at least three dimensions, whereas we have only two at most.' Morrissey builds up her own pictographs, imagining the world as juxtaposed geometric modules, reminiscent of a Chinese children's game called tangram. Each participant is given a certain number of squares, rectangles and triangles of paper, which can be used to create real-life images; so a square with a triangle on top becomes a house. Morrissey uses a similar technique to deconstruct the world, reconstructing it into her own poetic world.

'To Imagine an Alphabet' looks at the Chinese writing system of ancient pictographs. The first part describes language in its unity of signifier and signified: 'the character of mountain actually looks like a mountain, the character for fire actually looks like a fire and so on.' As Morrissey adds, it was 'a state of innocence if you like, before the fall of language into its own realm.' Then, the mode of the poem changes, starting from: "A mind is inside the lines" (54). From this point onwards, Morrissey comments on how people express their own psychological make-up in language. In her opinion, 'they become ideological, and their connectedness to the objects in the world which they are trying to describe becomes infused with all of these extra significances.'

The third section of the poem deals with the reinvention of a language. In Morrissey's terms,

One of the thing I did when I was learning a new character was to draw extra bits on so I could remember it more easily. [...] bringing it back to the original in a way, when sign and signified are still connected. However, I would also draw new pictures over them, my own pictures, pictures drawn from my own psychology, so the sign and the signified became severed once again.

This conflict between different systems of signification brings chaos, followed by Killing, Lamentation and Grief. Peace is restored by a deer "who prepares to walk and preach" (55). This sacred Buddhist animal bears the flaming heart of compassion.

'To Imagine an Alphabet' shows Morrissey's belief that Japanese culture is untranslatable. She is indeed aware of the huge cultural gap which separates Japan and the West, and knows that she does not belong "There" (Ogaki), but "Here" (Belfast). However, she does not define Japan in binary terms. She has avoided stereotyped descriptions of ancient versus modern, sushi versus McDonald's. The keywords she offers for an understanding of Japanese culture are 'tolerance of opposites.'

Perhaps the best way to understand Morrissey's literary achievement is the Japanese concept of ma (Galliano 2004). Linked to Zen Buddhism, it expresses a moment in space or time in which the human mind is enlightened. It is a pause between two different stages of life, which is constant change. Ma is inbetweenness, being neither "Here" nor "There". It is an evocation of things which cannot be expressed. This concept is strictly related to Japanese aesthetics. Japanese visual arts, the Noh theatre, the Tea ceremony and flower arranging are all centred on ma. In this inbetweenness or 'absence', in Zeami's sense, in this pause which is more eloquent than any speech, lies the beauty of Morrissey's Japanese poetry.