Sinéad Morrissey has a piece of news that, the day we meet, is still subject to a media embargo and so is laced with the relish of a secret. She has been asked to become the first Belfast poet laureate – a post dreamed up by the city’s lord mayor, Mairtín Ó Muilleoir, as a way to reflect the city’s growing confidence and to try to nurture a new civic identity not constructed along traditional, tribal lines.
The honour sits well with Morrissey. She is powerfully associated with her native city, despite having lived for spells in Dublin, New Zealand, Japan and Germany. Her latest collection, Parallax, is deeply bound up with Belfast and was inspired by the groundbreaking images of the city's slums by the Edwardian photographer Alexander Robert Hogg.
The new collection also includes frequent references to Belfast Lough, the place where Morrissey feels "most grounded" and near which she and her American husband, Joseph Pond, live.
As for a more inclusive Belfast identity, Morrissey is a shoo-in. Despite growing up in sectarianism-ravaged Portadown and, later, north Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s, she never identified with either of the two main traditions. Both her parents were card-carrying communists, and she and her brother were reared in a small but highly orthodox community of like-minded comrades.
“We absolutely believed there would be a workers’ revolution,” she says with a chuckle. “I felt so lucky and privileged to know this before other people.”
Such an upbringing, so radically at variance with the Protestantism and Catholicism that, during the Troubles, seemed to be vying for the title of “most god-fearing”, left the young Morrissey “quite alienated” from her peers, but she is grateful now to have had such a liberal start.
“We cared about poverty, we cared about gay people, we were feminists,” she says. “So although there was a reality check waiting to happen, there was a lot that was positive.”
Still, Belfast in the 1980s wasn’t a great place for many, and the young Morrissey “couldn’t wait to get out and never come back”. She studied English and German at Trinity College Dublin and, after teaching abroad for some years, came back to Ireland to undertake a PhD in 18th-century literature.
She returned to Belfast in 1999, five years after the IRA ceasefire. “The more I lived away, the more homesick I became,” she says. “It was an awful place when I left, but there’s so much buzz and optimism about it now. I love it.”
So she was delighted when, last summer, she was asked to write the spoken- word sections of the multimedia extravaganza Land of Giants, a huge piece of outdoor theatre that set out to tell the story of Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, and to celebrate the achievements of its people across the centuries.
It was while researching that project that Morrissey stumbled across the raw material that would inform her most recent poetry. “I pored through archives at the Ulster Hall. I became passionately interested in early photography and how it acted as a vehicle for social change. Alexander Robert Hogg’s images, for example, would have been viewed by upper-class women; it would have been the first time in history that they were directly confronted with the reality of Belfast’s slums. I was also fascinated by photography presenting itself as this new medium that would always portray the truth.”
Morrissey explores these themes in Parallax, in her characteristically taut, semiformal rhythms. One of its most satisfying poems, The Doctors, is about the practice of "disappearing" from Soviet state photographs the (very many) people who had fallen foul of Stalin: "With scissors, / nail files, ink and Sellotape, he has been vanished – / alongside other party operatives who touched His sleeve, or didn't clap for long enough, or loved / their wives, or laughed, or who pointed the way / down some rickety steps as though He needed help".
Perhaps because of its strong sense of history and place, Parallax reads like Morrissey's least personal collection. Her previous publication, Through the Square Window – an Irish Times/Poetry Now award winner – was awash with images of pregnancy and the infancies of her two children, Augustine and Sofia.
Although there are poems in Parallax that position themselves in the domestic sphere, much of it looks outwards, such as the witty and sexy The High Window, written in the style of a Raymond Chandler noir.
Morrissey's day job is teaching creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, where her fellow tutors include Ciarán Carson and Medbh McGuckian. The North's poetry community is a small world, with friends and colleagues often pitted against each other for recognition. Morrissey recently lost out to Heaney for Britain's most valuable award, the Forward Prize, for which she had been nominated a second time with Parallax.
One of her favourite discoveries that she made while writing Parallax was that Charles Dickens insisted on addressing the female linen workers of Belfast – with tickets reduced to a fraction of the normal cost – as part of a series of lectures he gave in 1867. It is easy to see why she feels so passionately. The Dickens anecdote seems to press all of her buttons: social history, class struggle, women, the power of literature, Belfast.
"Nearly 1,000 women squeezed in to the Ulster Hall," she says, eyes shining and long fingers gesticulating. "He read them an extract from A Christmas Carol. The book hadn't even been published. Can you imagine how electrifying that must have been? Seriously?"
Parallax is published by Carcanet
