Book cover for Sinéad Morrissey’s Selected Poems “Found Architecture”

“There is throughout Morrissey’s work a civic dimension: her imagination is dynamically peopled, as are her various landscapes and sense of history, and she is drawn to the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of all human intention and inquiry, as well as to celebrating individual women and men and the things they create or unleash. There is always a paradox which she enters and explores, making it luminous but never resolving it. For Morrissey, each poem becomes a word-space in which readers are set free on their own journey of discovery.”

Carcanet Press is one of the outstanding independent literary publishers of our time. Now in its fifth decade, Carcanet publishes the most comprehensive and diverse list available of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation, as well as a range of inventive fiction, Lives and Letters and literary criticism.

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784109318

The image on the cover is an ink drawing on Hasegawa Ganpi Paper titled “Lineale 41”, 67 x 54 cm, 2019. Photo: Uwe Walter.

“Looking back over this quarter-century of work, from There was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to On Balance (2017), much has changed. If some poets arrive, while some poets are made, I definitely belong to the latter category. Machinist (mediocre or not) is the more apposite metaphor, and the most striking thing I take away from Found Architecture is the struggle for articulacy. Poem by poem, book by book, I keep trying to say things in better ways.”

https://carcanetblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/found-architecture-sinead-morrissey.html