Last Winter

A poem by TS Eliot Prize-winner Sinéad Morrissey.

By SinAcad Morrissey

was not like last winter, we said, when winter

had ground its iron teeth in earnest: Belfast

colder than Moscow and a total lunar eclipse

hanging its Chinese lantern over the solstice.

Last winter we wore jackets into November

and lost our gloves, geraniums persisted,

our new pot-bellied stove sat unlit night

after night and inside our lungs and throats,

embedded in our cells, viruses churned out

relaxed, unkillable replicas of themselves

in the friendlier temperatures. Our son

went under. We’d lie awake, not touching,

and listen to him cough. He couldn’t walk

for weakness in the morning. Thoracic,

the passages and hallways in our house

got stopped with what we would not say –

how, on our wedding day, we’d all-at-once

felt shy to be alone together, back

from the cacophony in my tiny, quiet flat

and surrounded by flowers.

***

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, Parallax, published by Carcanet Press, has just been awarded the TS Eliot Prize.

The collection is preoccupied with the ways we approach objects, people and places in photography and poetry, and how our perspective is manipulated without our knowing it. “The first poem I wrote was inspired by Alexander Robert Hogg’s photography of Belfast slum life, and how the photographs falsify what they show,” she told the NS this week.

This multiple or “parallax” view is specifically Northern Irish. “Back home things tend to be very bipartisan. There’s two dominant camps and their view of things is different from each other.” Morrissey, who was raised by an Irish Catholic father and English Anglican mother, says she has always felt herself to exist “outside that binary”. “It was very helpful to me in developing a flexibility of approach.”