Parallax

Parallax is named for the optical fact that an object appears to shift when the eye observing it moves, and Sinéad Morrissey builds a whole poetics from it: this is a book about seeing, about cameras, telescopes, dioramas, home movies, and doctored photographs, and about how every image, private or official, depends on where the viewer was allowed to stand. Belfast, her city, supplies the test cases. The collection keeps returning to its documented past, the shipyards and terraces caught by early photographers, the propaganda and surveillance of a city that has been watched by someone for a century, and sets those public exposures against domestic ones, family scenes, a marriage, children, rendered with the same alertness to angle and exclusion, what the frame admits and what it was arranged to keep out. Morrissey's technique is a pleasure in itself, formally various, metrically alert, capable of ventriloquizing a Victorian diarist or riding a long documentary line, and the intelligence is never cold; the book's poems about her own household carry real warmth inside their precision. The chair of the judges, Ian Duhig, called Parallax politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, and the 2013 T.S. Eliot Prize it won made Morrissey the first Northern Irish winner since Michael Longley took it in 2000, a return with a difference: the Troubles generation's successor examining not the violence but the images it left. The following year Belfast named her its first poet laureate, a job this book reads like an application for, the city's own parallax made art.