TLS, Review by Rory Waterman

Sinead Morrissey is still well under forty and Through the Square Window is her fourth full collection. That is quite prolific going, but there is nothing rushed about her work; and this is a book of meticulous craft and thought. One of many prominent Nothern Irish poets, Morrissey has a refreshing lack of interest in exploiting the Troubles as she takes the reader around Belfast and its environs in the twenty-first century. There is a strong sense of place running through her earlier collections and it emerges again in poems such as 'Through the Square Window', 'Cycling at Sea Level', and the extraordinary 'A Device for Monitoring Brain Activity by Shining Light into the Pupil':
A liner in the foreground of the Lough
- dead-centre but already passing on -
white as a tent in Plantagenet France.

Morrissey is not a regional poet and her work often maintains an international outlook (though none of these poems will be quoted by tourist boards: Arizona is 'where humans cannot live/except indoors',and nothing but 'woods, sugar - /bust, pylons, sheep' is 'what passes/for the world in West Quebec'). Still, her poems about 'elsewhere' - and there are several here - are underscored by a very definite sense of where she is from, and are the stronger for it.


Morrissey is particularly good at the sort of evocative image that enters a reader's head and stays there. Perhaps her greatest talent is for gracefully understated and at times unsettling - genuinely unsettling - narrative poetry punctuated by such evocations. A pregnant woman's trip to 'the privy' in 'Fairground Music' is chillingly and vividly rendered; as is 'Telegraph', which describes, from birth to incipient parenthood, a life ruined by cruelty, and which then leaves off with an unanswerable question:
Whose fault that for twelve years afterwards in that house
a man slipped into the room of a child kept back from the tiny window,
and nightly undid what only the hawk moths witnessed?
'Whose Fault', indeed; and now it's over to us. In such poems Morrissey does not sentimentalize or make moral judgements, instead passing clear images of suffering and cruelty into the hands of the reader before walking away.


The half-dozen or so least valuable poems here seem to stop unnecessarily short. Morrissey has an occasional habit of taking the reader aside to share her epiphanies, which might or might not come off:
This planet, this cloudy planet, is the earth.
We cannot guess how flawed and insignificant it is
unless we travel, in our imaginations, to another star...
I beg to differ. But the poet's tongue is in her cheek because this is the opening to a poem about the 1970s children's television series 'The Clangers': the reader is swiftly removed to 'the Clanger planet' and shown Tiny Clanger, Major Clanger and the others doing what Clangers do, or did. Morrissey is taking a nostalgic journey, and is careful not to bring too much sentimentality with her. Through the Square Window is Morrissey's most consistent, surprising and challenging book, eminently readable and re-readable.