Sinead
Sinead Morrissey talks to Maureen Coleman about her award-winning poetry, her part in the Land of Giants project, and her life back in Northern Ireland with her American husband after living in the US, Japan and New Zealand

If it's true that travel broadens the mind, then it's little wonder Sinead Morrissey is an award-winning poet. Having lived in Germany, Japan, the US and New Zealand, the Portadown-born bard has had plenty of experiences to draw on, particularly evident in her earlier bodies of work.

Yet back now in Belfast - the city in which she grew up - Sinead's feet have stopped itching and she says that there is nowhere else in the world she would rather be. After meeting her American husband, Joseph, in Japan, the couple lived in Arizona for a while before moving to New Zealand, where her mother resides.


But a bout homesickness lured her back to Northern Ireland. It was post-ceasefires and the city she returned to was almost unrecognisable from the city she had left. 'I was away when the ceasefires happened,' she says. 'I came back to experience life here after these monumental events had taken place.'

'The development of the Laganside area had already happened by then but the city is so vibrant now, it's breath-taking. Nothern Ireland provides such rich pickings for a poet, it has such an amazing heritage and literary legacy. But it's a dynamic place to live now as a a citizen, not just as a poet.'

To date, Sinead (40) has had four poetry books published. There was a Fire in Vancouver (1996); Between Here and There (2002); The State of the Prisons (2005) and Through the Square Window (2009).Three of these collections have been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, while her most recent volume was also shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) in 2010. At the moment she is working on her fifth collection of work, although she had to put aside her own writing for a few months last year after she was invited to take part in a massive new project, Land of Giants.

The epic show, which will take place next weekend, is the largest outdoor arts event ever staged in Northern Ireland. Awarded £750,000 by the Legacy Trust UK, it is one of the biggest in the Cultural Olympiad calendar across the UK and one of only four community celebration to be funded by the organisation. With up to 500 performers and an expected audience of 18,000, it is hoped the unique event - which sets out to tell the story of Northern Ireland - will provide a lasting legacy for the cultural industry.
Sinead's significant role was to write poems and prose for the event. Two of her poems will act as the prologue and finale of the event, introducing the themes at the start and tying them up at the end. She has also penned the text for the central Titanic choral work, including details of the ship and the experiences of those who built her. And she has written what she describes as a 'family album of sorts', a section of biographies of fictional Belfast people from 1869 to 2012. The lives and voices of the people of the city are interwoven though the show, telling the tale of the city set against certain historical backdrops.


'Last August the writer and director of Land of Giants, Mark Murphy, came over to Belfast to see me, to talk about the project and to give me an idea of the scale that's involved,' says Sinead. 'It's very different to anything I've ever done before. As well as the two poems which open and close the show, I had to write eight fictional biographies of people who lived in the city between 1869 and the present day. It was lovely to have a brief to work to but for this part of the show, I had the freedom to interpret it whichever way I wanted.

A senior lecturer in creative writing at Queen's University, Sinead was intoroduced to poetry at a very young age, when a primary school teacher brought in a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson and encouraged her pupils to go home and write their own composition.
The eight-year-old child, who had moved from Portadown to north Belfast, found it rewarding - and easy - to make her words rhyme. She was instantly hooked. 'I was always scribbling away but from the age of 10, I started writing quite fervently,' she says. Her father bought her a book of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry and around the same time, Sinead joined a local Speech and Drama group, where her talents was further nurtured.

At the tender age of 11 she won her first poetry prize - a Highly Commended certificate in the Irish Schools Creative Writing Awards for The Famine From the View of an Absentee Landlord. She laughs at the memory now, the simplicity of her work.
'I think the judges liked it because I wrote the poem from the perspective of the landlord, which was probably quite different for a child,' she says. At Belfast High School she recieved great encouragement from her teachers and continued to write. It was a happy childhood, she tells me, but for a child of the Troubles, growing up in north Belfast, quite unusual as well. Both Sinead's parents were communists and atheists. 'I didn't belong to any one church,' she says. 'I'm not an atheist myself. I do have a sense of something else out there, I'm just not sure what it is.'

Then, when she was 18, Sinead got her big break, winning the Patrick Kavanagh Prize for Poetry - the youngest ever winner of the competition. She was studying English and German at Trinity College Dublin when she heard the news from her mother. Sinead had sent off around 20 poems and had forgotten about it, until she got the phone call. 'I couldn't believe it,' she says. 'I got a cheque for £1,000, which was a lot of money at the time. I gave some to charity and some to my brother. It was such an important achievement for me. I knew that this is what I wanted to do, to write poetry, but I was under no illusion that I would make a living out of it.'

While still at Trinity, Sinead took a year out and moved to Flensburg, Germany, when she decided to send off some of her poems to Michael Schmidt, founder of Carcanet Press. The poet and author was enthusiastic about her work and encouraged her to put a book together. With her finals behind her, she met up with Michael in Manchester and after several discussions, her first collection, There Was A Fire In Vancouver, was published. A month after that first meeting with Michael, Sinead headed off to Japan, to teach English as part of the JET programme. Within days of her arrival in a small village in Japan, she met her husband-to-be, Joseph Pond, who was also in the country taking part in the programme. Was it love at first sight? 'It was love at first hearing,' she laughs. 'I was mesmerised when I heard him talk.' The couple enjoyed a whirlwind romance and were married in a Japanese ceremony.
'It was so beautiful.' she says. 'The wedding took place in 1,000-year-old temple near the village where I was teaching. It was wonderful day.'

Her time spent in Japan was to heavily influence her second book, Between Here and There. Its contents divide her thoughts on home and her travels. The book opens 'In Belfast', with the second part a poem sequence about her experiences of Japan. On the book's eventual publication in 2002, following a period of illness and writer's block, The Daily Telegraph gave it a glowing review, saying, 'Sinead Morrissey's sequence about Japan must be read by everyone who loves poetry.' After a few years in Japan the young couple decided to move to New Zealand to begin a new life. But surprisingly, Sinead became homesick for Belfast.

'It was weird,' she admits. 'I hadn't been homesick before and all of a sudden I wanted to be in a place that felt familiar. I was also very excited about the peace process, so we packed up our things and came back to Northern Ireland.' Joseph, she tells me, settled in well. 'The weather was a bit of a shock for him at first, but he's been here 13 years now, so he's got used to it.' And 2002 was to prove a defining year for Sinead. It not only marked the publication date Between Here and There, but she was also appointed the 2002 Poetry International Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast. 'I find teaching at Queen's so stimulating,' she says. 'Some of my students are just breathtaking.'

Her most recent collection, Through The Square Window, is perhaps her most personal work to date and certainly her most successful. The predominant theme is motherhood - the conception, pregnancy and birth of her five-year-old son Augustine. Since then, Sinead and Joseph have had a second child, Sophia. 'Motherhood was such a life-changing experience for me and a huge inspiration,' she says. 'I felt completely different, although the birth of my daughter was not such a paradigm shift. Through The Square Window is my attempt to articulate that shift.'

The title poem of this collection - an enigmatic and anxiety dream scenario - won the UK National Poetry Competition in 2007. The book was short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. She has also won a £15,000 Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northen Ireland. Having completed her work on Land of Giants, Sinead is now at the 'embryonic stage' of her fifth collection of poetry. She says she's not quite sure if there is a theme yet, but this book will be inspired by visual media and old photographs, a nod to the past that fired up her imagination while working on Mark Murphy's new project. Delving into Northern Ireland's history, while researching her material for Land of Giants, has given her food for thought. 'You know, I've travelled to so many places, lived in different countries, but right now, there is nowhere on this earth I would rather be than Belfast,' she says.