Through the Square Window

Reviews / Votes

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, //as though we still held Passchendaele in our pockets /and could find a way to save them'. Her poems of pregnancy deliver an equal existential drop. In the extraordinary Matter, which moves through 'the laws of spontaneous generation' to observe a contemporary conception, 'I still think /of our lovemaking as a kind of door /to wherever you were, waiting in matter, /spooled into a form I have not yet been shown'. This slip into abstraction is executed with such grace that we believe we're reading about empirical science - then find we've imagined conception afresh.

'Love, the night-watch . . .' is equally generous in the world it recruits to make sense of the moments of birth: from radio call-signs to its metaphor of the mother as a haystack 'collapsing almost imperceptibly /at first, then caving in spectacularly'. Nothing compromises the beautiful diction of this touching poem - and yet there is a wry self-knowing, akin to humour, on display. The Hanging Hare, which might have settled for straight observation of the creature's 'foxglove fur', instead shows us what it stands for - a capacious vision 'of unimpeded air, /of whitethorn-quartered fields'. A sequence of dark parables - Vanity Fair, The Innocents, Fairground Music, Telegraph: none of these titles innocent of resonance - confirms that all is not sweetness and light in Morrissey's imaginary; and with this new dark note, threat or promise, the collection promises yet more for the future. My Best Books of 2009 - Glenn Patterson

...Sinead Morrissey's new book of poetry, Through The Square Window (Carcanet) is great. When you hear her read her work, it's staggering, you can't get her voice out of your heard. Like so many of the current Irish crop, you couldn't corral her with other peopel who happen to inhabit the same island. TS Eliot prize

The Sunday Times review by Alan Brownjohn: a preview of the 10 shortlistees for the prestigious poetry prize

The annual 10-book shortlist for the GBP15,000 TS??Eliot prize can be re-lied on to provide an intriguing mix of obvious candidates and surprising outsiders. But the experienced poet judges for 2009 (Simon Armitage, Collette Bryce and Penelope -Shuttle) have added some particularly wild cards to the four choices already delivered to them by the Poetry Book Society. (The PBS makes a quarterly choice for its members, and those four titles automatically go on the shortlist.)

Last year saw admirable new collections from Andrew Motion, Don Paterson (winner of the 2009 Forward prize) and Peter Porter. None is among the Eliot 10. -Sharon Olds is; but her marvellous fellow-American John Ashbery remains oddly beyond the range of the judges. One of the PBS choices, Alice Oswald's Weeds and Wild Flowers (Faber GBP14.99), presents a problem. The poet described it as 'two separate books', her poems not relating specifically to Jessica Greenman's prominent, beautifully exact etchings. The poetry has a weird charm (Snowdrop is 'A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed'), but lacks the boldness and range that won Oswald this prize with Dart in 2002.

...This surely deserves to be one of the best propositions for the prize, along with Sinead Morrissey's Through the Square Window (Carcanet GBP9.95), which offers scary and witty poems about pregnancy, birth and a child acquiring language. There is some risk of overload, but the assemblages of eerie detail in Electric Edwardians and (especially) Telegraph make those poems memorable. The cover of Sinead Morrissey's excellent TS Eliot prize-shortlisted collection, Through the Square Window, shows a young girl in the head-bowed, arms-raised, slightly knock-kneed posture of a preacher channelling the word of the Lord. It's an unsettling image that resolves itself into a picture of innocence when we read the title of the photograph on the back cover: Girl About to Do a Handstand (1957). To have been wrong-footed makes a fitting first impression, for the book's central theme is early childhood: a time when expectations will be flouted and outflanked. In 'Cathedral' the speaker addresses the infant, saying 'I wanted the words / you attempted first to be solid and obvious: / apple, finger, spoon'. But language will not be bidden or held back, and the two-year-old surprises his parents by announcing: 'at six o'clock the ghost / of a child might come and eat porridge. / We are speechless.'

Morrissey is too clear-eyed to allow anything whimsical to encroach on her observations: a baby is born 'crook-shouldered, blue, believable, beyond me - / in a thunder of blood, in a flood-plain of intimate stains'. Nevertheless, the experience of motherhood returns the poet to something like a child's perspective, and many of the poems strike a tone of hushed excitement. This is particularly effective in the poems about situations that bring out the inner child in all of us, such as listening to a thunderstorm at night, brilliantly evoked in the opening poem, 'Storm'.

Childhood brings with it a host of real and imagined dangers, and sometimes the source of the danger turns out to be the child itself. 'The Innocents' engages with the 1961 film of that name and with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, ending with the image of 'Master Miles / . . . considering his goodnight kiss'; and in 'Telegraph' we follow a child through the depressingly familiar arc from abused to abuser. The poem is a sestina, and the repeated end words tell much of the story: child, house, witness, window, night, fault. The poem cannot escape these end-words any more than the child can outrun his circumstances: 'Whose fault that for twelve years afterwards in that house / a man slipped into the room of a child, kept back from the tiny window, / and nightly undid what only the hawk moths witnessed?'

The title poem is a dream vision set in l'heure bleue. In an unnerving matter-of-fact tone we are told that the dead have 'arrived / to wash the windows of my house'; though the speaker senses that they have really come for her son, who 'sleeps on unregarded in his cot'. The poem subtly draws together the book's motifs - children and the dead, clouds and water, windows and witnesses - while the observing eye remains as precise as ever: 'The clouds above the Lough are stacked / like the clouds are stacked above Delft. / They have the glutted look of clouds over water.'

The reference to Delft evokes the distinctive blue porcelain named after the city, and also Derek Mahon's poem of imagined childhood, 'Courtyards in Delft'. When one of the dead appears as a 'blue boy', we recognise another suppressed allusion, this time to EE Cummings's enigmatic question 'how do you like your blue-eyed boy / Mister Death'. The poem is concerned with inheritance, both in terms of literary precursors and the world that awaits the sleeping child. The anxiety that the child may be threatened by the dead asks to be read in terms of Morrissey's Belfast upbringing. Suddenly, the speaker wakes from her vision: 'flat on my back with a cork / in my mouth, bottle-stoppered, in fact, / like a herbalist's cure for dropsy.'Dropsy is an excess of water, returning us to the image of those ominous, glutted clouds: the speaker has absorbed the poem's dangers, in an attempt to protect the child from them.

Along with Colette Bryce and Leontia Flynn, Morrissey is one of a number of younger poets from Northern Ireland who are negotiating the mixed blessing of having such illustrious antecedents as Mahon (also a cloud-watcher poet) and Seamus Heaney ('The Invitation' features a child-Narcissus, as in Heaney's celebrated 'Personal Helicon'). To honour such an inheritance requires all the confidence and care of a high-wire act, and Through the Square Window shows Morrissey is more than up to the task. With its incisive imagery and taut rhythms, the collection is a formal triumph; but what makes it truly marvellous is the emotional pressure Morrissey maintains: the poems come to us with the intimacy of whispered secrets. Sinead Morrissey was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1972, brought up in Belfast and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002) and The State of the Prisons (2005), the last two of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. After spending several years abroad, in New Zealand and Japan, she is now back home in Ireland, lecturing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.

She wrote the first poem for this collection when she was pregnant with her son and the last when her daughter was two weeks old: 'It encompasses the intensity of early parenthood, which I had to be true to, as the new touchstone of my life.' It also encompasses her own childhood; family stories, about deaths as well as births; and myths and dreams about conception.

Morrissey has a good eye and a good ear - 'a white yacht leans on the breeze' - and the best poems - such as Storm, Ice, Fairground Music and A Device for Monitoring Brain Activity by Shining Light into the Pupil - positively fizz with fresh ideas and images: 'The tree looked like a crocodile's ribcage / as I passed along the perimeter, or the wide-propped / jawbone of a whale. Until it became, the further / I walked, a canoe, asleep on the water and fettered // with algae.'

She hears 'the distant hoof beats of a heart' and spots children 'staring back at us, across the lens' promise, / as though we still held Passchendaele in our pockets.' Out of her window she can see 'if I crane my neck' Belfast Lough which forms a visual and emotional backdrop to this book: 'Across the Lough / - if only for a moment - hillsides / snided in gorse bushes crackled and sang.'

There are a couple of dud moments - York isn't so much a 'found poem', as she calls it, as a list of medieval guilds - and she does like to show off her vocabulary drawn from some of the dustier parts of the dictionary - meniscus, homunculus, infusoria - but those are minor quibbles. Mostly this is a magnificent achievement; Morrissey's imagination, married to her emotional honesty and technical virtuosity - Vanity Fair, in the form of a letter from Amelia Sedley to William Dobbin, is a particularly clever poem - means that this year she might get off the shortlist and on to the winner's podium. Sinead Morrissey's poems on the rites of motherhood give a raw, queasy sense of selfhood's boundaries being pushed and eroded.

'I was a haystack the children climbed / and ruined' she writes in 'Love, the nightwatch . . .', a tender portrait of the damage wrought by birth.

But where the voice of Through the Square Window appears to confide and share, its undertone questions, almost bluntly, those events that seem to pass into fact. In the brilliantly sustained 'Matter', the idea of a child's conception is followed through its philosophical and scientific iterations down the ages; each layer of knowledge bringing the central mystery no closer. Morrissey casually intercepts with: 'I still think / of our lovemaking as a kind of door / to wherever you were, waiting in matter'.

There is much to marvel at in this fourth collection from the Northern Irish poet - not least the way that she matches childhood's discoveries with a fiercely inventive eye. A child 'has been taking the wheel of speech / into his mouth / then letting it go / to test its new circumference'. TLS, Review by Rory Waterman

Sinead Morrissey is still well under forty and Through the Square Window is her fourth full collection.That is quite prolific going, but there is nothing rushed about her work; and this is a book of meticulous craft and thought.One of many prominent Nothern Irish poets, Morrissey has a refreshing lack of interest in exploiting the Troubles as she takes the reader around Belfast and its environs in the twenty-first century.There is a strong sense of place running through her earlier collections and it emerges again in poems such as 'Through the Square Window', 'Cycling at Sea Level', and the extraordinary 'A Device for Monitoring Brain Activity by Shining Light into the Pupil':

A liner in the foreground of the Lough

- dead-centre but already passing on -

white as a tent in Plantagenet France.

Morrissey is not a regional poet and her work often maintains an international outlook (though none of these poems will be quoted by tourist boards: Arizona is 'where humans cannot live/except indoors',and nothing but 'woods, sugar - /bust, pylons, sheep' is 'what passes/for the world in West Quebec').Still, her poems about 'elsewhere' - and there are several here - are underscored by a very definite sense of where she is from, and are the stronger for it.

Morrissey is particularly good at the sort of evocative image that enters a reader's head and stays there.Perhaps her greatest talent is for gracefully understated and at times unsettling - genuinely unsettling - narrative poetry punctuated by such evocations.A pregnant woman's trip to 'the privy' in 'Fairground Music' is chillingly and vividly rendered; as is 'Telegraph', which describes, from birth to incipient parenthood, a life ruined by cruelty, and which then leaves off with an unanswerable question:

Whose fault that for twelve years afterwards in that house

a man slipped into the room of a child kept back from the tiny window,

and nightly undid what only the hawk moths witnessed?

'Whose Fault', indeed; and now it's over to us.In such poems Morrissey does not sentimentalize or make moral judgements, instead passing clear images of suffering and cruelty into the hands of the reader before walking away.

The half-dozen or so least valuable poems here seem to stop unnecessarily short.Morrissey has an occasional habit of taking the reader aside to share her epiphanies, which might or might not come off:

This planet, this cloudy planet, is the earth.

We cannot guess how flawed and insignificant it is

unless we travel, in our imaginations, to another star...

I beg to differ.But the poet's tongue is in her cheek because this is the opening to a poem about the 1970s children's television series 'The Clangers': the reader is swiftly removed to 'the Clanger planet' and shown Tiny Clanger, Major Clanger and the others doing what Clangers do, or did.Morrissey is taking a nostalgic journey, and is careful not to bring too much sentimentality with her.Through the Square Window is Morrissey's most consistent, surprising and challenging book, eminently readable and re-readable. Sinead Morrisey's 1996 debut volume, published when she was 24, marked her out as a poet to watch. Her exceptional fourth collection Through the Square Window, more than fulfils that early promise.

Avid for a world "clamouring to be experienced", her lyrics and narratives (she is equally good at both) teem with creatuers, ideas and people: Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation, the gift of a dead hare, and Edwardian children caught on film. Lewis Carroll's Alice, appears several times.

As its title's nod to Play School suggests, the book dwells on childhood, with poems about an infant's acquisition of language, the rhymes and games of the nursery and the playground, and the transitoriness of childhood itself, likened to a passing royal visit. "Staring west/ at the last of a trail of dust", the parents stand at the kerb, memorising "the hair, the eyes,/ the inscrutable footmen. the marvellous horses."

In a couple of poems, the dead look in at the window and the book as a whole is poised between life and death. But Morrissey's writing is affectionate rather than sentimental, dark rather than morbid- a tribute to its vigour and formal deftness.

Shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize and a strong contender for this year's Forward prize, Through the Square Window is an impressive addition to a fine body of work. It confirms Sinead Morrissey as the outstanding poet of her generation. Sinead Morrissey's work has always been hungry for the world beyond the self and though a recent review of Through the Square Window argued she is in part negotiatinig with her Irish poetic forebears- Mahon and Heaney mostly- this is too parochial a view. She has travelled further out than this; it is Frost, Plat and Bishop whose influenc is evident. Helen Vendler has said of Bishop that she "staked out travel, in all its symbolic reaches of pilgrimage, exile, homelessness, exploration, exaustion, colonialising, mapping. and being lost"; and this is true of Morrissey's The State of Prisons (2005) but also of this new book which sweeps through Quebec, Amsterdam, Japan, Berne, Arkansas and home to Belfast. Stevens teased Frost for his over-reliance on "subjects" and Morrissey's worl can sometimes seem propelled bu her irressible love of information. But there is no denying she can orchestrate poems that are densely packed tous de force and many possess a terrific centrifugal poower in their desire to encounter the world. So Through The Square Window explores the boundary between self and the other; "the inside/ holding flickeringly, and the / outside clamouring in" (Storm).

The title's other allusion to childhood (differently shaped windows in the now defunct BBC Play School programme) and the poet's son's birth fors a backbone through this new collection giving ita more conventional and domestic feel than its predecessor. The first poem, "Matter", begins with seventy lines concerning historical theories of the spontaneous generation of life from Aristotle to Paracelsus and Leeuwenhoek but finallu locates itself in the new life of the child, "feetto my heart/ and skull to the pelvic cradle", successfully making the creation of life (now scientifically understood) seem miraculous still. Elsewhere the vulnerability of childhood is uppermost in Morrissey's penchant for long lines can lead to the looseness of rhythm and even xpression as when she tries to imagine her child's memories-

"in the womb or back, still further, in the undiscovered bourne poor Hamlet dreamed

of entering without map or compass aas a deliverance

from the siht of our back

garden in september. the apple tree

keeled over and cankered..."

(Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk)

But mostly these parenthood are delightful and insightful as when the mother's desire to control the child's development if language is defeated by his prodigious acquisitive powers that confound all expectations:

...then this:

at six o'clock the ghost

of a child might come and eat porridge.

We are speechless.

(Cathedral)