On Balance

£9.99

Sinead Morrissey

Teetering on the brink of various crises, Sinead Morrissey’s poems consider spectacular feats of human engineering – ships, planes, robots – from our radically unstable perspective, struggling for poise. Poems become pliable; the dead speak.

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SKU: 9781784103606 Category:

Description

Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award
Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award
Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize
Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinéad Morrissey’s sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland – the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane – celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in ‘Articulation’ we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, ‘whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz’, suspended in time ‘for however long he lasts before he crumbles’.

Additional information

Weight 114 g
Dimensions 21.6 × 13.5 × 0.7 cm
Author

Publisher

Carcanet Poetry

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

71

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

822.92 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K