On Balance

Reviews / Votes

'Morrissey is possessed of her own invigorating brand of Irish fluency and an imagination that never closes.'

Kate Kellaway, The Guardian 'Poet Sinead Morrissey gains power with each collection. She's one of those generous writers whose images and structures open so invitingly that your response is to grab a pen and write back to her: in other words, an inspiration.'

Hilary Mantel, from the TLS 'Books of the Year 2017' 'I can't not mention Sinead Morrissey - a wide-ranging, capacious, brilliant and entirely satisfying collection of poems that will be read many decades hence.'

Andrew Marr, from the New Statesman 'Books of the Year 2017' 'On Balance demonstrates that poems, far from being an obsolete technology, were never just mnemonic machines in the first place: they were always simply the perfect instrument for human voices, both living and (un)dead.'

Ange Mlinko, LRB 'I've always leaned on poetry as something more thrilling than...well, almost anything - religion, for instance. The older I get, the more essential poetry seems and, alas, the converse for the latter. Two books from this year give further proof of this: Sinead Morrissey's starry poetic engineering in On Balance (Carcanet) and Michael Longley's angelic Angel Hill (Jonathan Cape), which was also proof, maybe, that Homer never died. Northern Ireland's poets continue to outstare miserable politics and offer instead the better firearms of beauty and truth.'

Sebastian Barry, from the New Statesman 'Books of the Year 2017' 'The poem Nativity, if it stood alone, makes Sinead Morrissey's On Balance a sweet Christmas choice, but it is only one of a number of thought-provoking poems in her sixth, prize-winning collection. Morrissey floats the reader glimpses of desires unmet, memories still fluid; the stories swim beyond the edge of the page, buoyed up by possibility.'

Hilary Mantel, from the Guardian 'Books of the Year' 2017 'Sinead Morrissey's On Balance was a worthy winner of the 2017 Forward Prize. A celebration of resourcefulness, from motherhood to the first woman to build an aeroplane, its language is as poised as the acrobats it catches.'

Jeremy Noel-Tod, from the Sunday Times Book of the Year 2017 'Morrissey's clarity and confidence mean that On Balance approaches each of her subjects with great fluency and command.'

The Irish Times 'Sinead Morrissey's On Balance is a book of poetry that embraces the art of fiction, and that makes you think about the world being off kilter, of suspension, of what might be required to have balance. Amazing. And the deserving winner of the Forward Prize this year.'

Scottish Makar Jackie Kay, Herald Scotland Books of the Year 2017 'A game-changing volume of poems in her shining career.'

Damian Smyth, Head of Drama and Literature at Arts Council Northern Ireland, Belfast Telegraph 'Northern Irish poetry looks like it's about to take centre stage again, and the woman leading the charge is Sinead Morrissey.'

Cork Evening Echo Best Books of 2017 'Propulsive, compelling, melding narrative and lyric, Morrissey's poetry combines deep feeling with a probing, philosophical intelligence.'

The Poetry Review