Parallax: And Selected Poems

There are some hits and some misses in this collected work. Morrissey seems torn between traditional Irish poetry (writing about pies, the landscape, traction, etc.) and writing about more contemporary issues. I'd like to see more of,her experimental stuff and less of the covers of the topics which have been covered in Irish poetry to excess. All together, this is a goodish collection.

Her verse is not overly poetic or romantic, but conveys a powerful sense of seeing through someone else's eyes, a sense of place, a sense of a particular time or moment. Morrissey is part of the modern world, where information is constantly bombarding us, through all kinds of media -- we learn about her own domestic life, family and politics through the lens of some of these external events, past and present. She refers at the back to her sources of inspiration for 6 of the poems: each source is fascinating and the poems made me want to research them further.

Heaps of awards for Morrissey, including the TS Eliot Prize for Parallax, might be a hype too far for most of these poems.

Beautiful words .....

At its best Morrissey's poetry is taut and mesmerising.

Much fuss has been made of the title and its application. Fine: a thematic unity, an account of experience: this is potentially a persuasive device, but it is not sufficient. The language of the poems - and this is what matters - is flat, pedestrian, out of a strained imagination. Morrissey might be trying to tread a line between a common and heightened language but she does not do it well. Her attempts at the heightened are wordy and mechanical; her demotic is timid.She has written well in earlier volumes: I think of two poems, 'The Second Lesson of the Anatomists,' and 'Matter'. But nothing in Parallax is as strong.That Parallax won a big prize is depressing. So this is officially amongst the best that English poetry can offer its readers: desperate!