Sinead Morrissey's poems on the rites of motherhood give a raw, queasy sense of selfhood's boundaries being pushed and eroded.
'I was a haystack the children climbed / and ruined' she writes in 'Love, the nightwatch . . .', a tender portrait of the damage wrought by birth.
But where the voice of Through the Square Window appears to confide and share, its undertone questions, almost bluntly, those events that seem to pass into fact. In the brilliantly sustained 'Matter', the idea of a child's conception is followed through its philosophical and scientific iterations down the ages; each layer of knowledge bringing the central mystery no closer. Morrissey casually intercepts with: 'I still think / of our lovemaking as a kind of door / to wherever you were, waiting in matter'.
There is much to marvel at in this fourth collection from the Northern Irish poet - not least the way that she matches childhood's discoveries with a fiercely inventive eye. A child 'has been taking the wheel of speech / into his mouth / then letting it go / to test its new circumference'.