Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poets and Poems: Sinead Morrissey and “On Balance”

By Glynn Young 5 Comments

Girl on Bridge Sinead Morrissey

I’m reading On Balance, the newest collection by poet Sinead Morrissey, and for some odd reason, I keep being reminded of Brooklyn Bridge. It’s not that Morrissey’s collection is influenced by other poets who wrote about the bridge—Hart Crane, Jack Kerouac, and Marianne Moore among them. It’s more that the poems of this collection grapple with technology, the wonders technology brings, and the tradeoffs that technology always demands. I’m reminded, too, of the French Impressionist painters like Renoir who painted pastoral scenes with railway bridges and trains in the background (or foreground).

Morrissey lives in Belfast. Possibly the most famous ship ever constructed in the famous shipyards there was the Titanic, so it’s not a surprise to find the first poem (and the first about technology) in On Balance is about the doomed ship. Specifically, “The Millihelen” focuses on the moment the ship travels down the slipway into the water. It represents a marvelous feat of human engineering, and one that will eventually cost the lives of more than 1,500 people. Technology has its price.

The poems may address the telegraph, the cinema, coal mining, war, and even color photographs of tsarist Russia, but Morrissey is always reminding us of technology and its costs, and the disequilibrium it can cause with the natural world.  This is true even for something like a scientific expedition to Greenland, possible only because of technology, which is fully represented by the participants—a geologist, a photographer, an artist, a marine biologist, and an archaeologist. In a series of poems under the general title of “Whitelessness,” Morrissey gives each participant a soliloquy.

This is the first in that series, “The Geologist”:

On Balance Sinead MorrisseyThe rocks on Greenland are the oldest on Earth.
This one’s a fossilised algal mat; this one
contains the ridges of human teeth:
some early Paleolithic adolescent caught
grinning at the moment of death
in a stone photograph. We manoeuvre
them down to the beach on a stretcher.
Ochres and greys and blacks
ricochet back and forth across the massif,
as denuded of white as the West of Ireland,
while the shed ice bobs in the bay
begging smaller and smaller comparisons—
lozenges dissolving visibly on the tongue;
droplets of fat on broth. If it’s life
that controls the geological machinery
of the planet, rather than the other way round,
we are neither new, nor tragic. This came
to me one morning as I sorted out my cabin
and the hundreds of marathon runners
in my brain stopped and changed direction.

Sinead Morrissey

Sinead Morrissey

The italicized words in the poem are they key, and Morrissey plays two ideas almost in reverse of what might be expected. “Life” is what brings technology; “the geological machinery” actually represents the natural world. She is perhaps suggesting here that we see technology as the natural thing, and nature as something to be controlled and regulated.

Morrissey has published five other poetry collections: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996); Between Here and There (2002); State of the Prisons (2005); Through the Square Window (2010); and Parallax: And Selected Poems (2015), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. On Balance won the Forward Prize for poetry earlier this year. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Trinity College Dublin, and was named Belfast’s first poet laureate in 2014.

On Balance is not a screed against technology. But it is a reminder that, like Prometheus and his theft of fire, technology brings the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Related:

Poets and Poems: Hart Crane, “The Bridge,” and Me

Browse more poets and poems

Browse more book reviews

Photo by Diane Rosete, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, and Poetry at Work.

__________________________

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Follow Glynn
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Follow Glynn
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Do You Remember the First Poetry Book You Bought? - September 26, 2023
  • Poets and Poems: Yvor Winters and “Selected Poems” - September 19, 2023
  • “The Battle of Maldon” by J.R.R Tolkien, Edited by Peter Grybauskas - September 12, 2023

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Britain, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Get Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    December 19, 2017 at 11:47 am

    Marvelous sample poem, which I am still puzzling through. 🙂

    The opening and the ending seem at odds. In the opening, the stones brought the death of someone in the prime of life. So it seems that the stones are the center of the “machine.”

    But then, it is the” fossilised algal mat” and “the ridges of human teeth” that has made the stone, in part. And this life-in-death is now being “manoeuvre[d]…down to the beach on a stretcher”—an image of rescue (less than control, I think).

    So the real question is what new direction did the marathon runners in her brain take?

    Something to do with “we are neither new, nor tragic,” seems plausible. Something, perhaps, like an illumination that even when we move things around, treat the stones like something to be rescued, we are not in control. We are part of the whole. And, in being part of the whole, this makes us not new and not tragic—perhaps taking the pressure off our racing selves.

    Reply
    • Bethany R. says

      December 19, 2017 at 1:49 pm

      What a fascinating post and featured poem. I’m also still thinking through it, L.L. 🙂 Yes, what new direction did the marathon runners in her brain take? What a great image for the forever-active thoughts we work with through the years—and what it’s like to shift perspectives (at least that’s how I absorb it).

      Just brainstorming here – for me, so much is tied up in that fossil containing “the ridges of human teeth” and the idea that the subject is “grinning at the moment of death”. Was she? The first thing I thought of there, was that this poor soul probably needed something to bear down on as she suffered in her last days. But I juxtapose that with the poet’s idea that “…we are neither new, nor tragic.” Was this person the victim in a bigger, older, natural world that she has no chance against? Or did they have some kind of control, and were leaving their mark?

      The title is interesting too.

      Reply
  2. Sandra Heska King says

    December 20, 2017 at 8:16 am

    Whitelessness. I had to stop to think about that word. There is a Whiteless Pike in England’s Lake District that apparently appeared in some of Wordsworth’s and Beatrix Potter writings. Then I went down a rabbit hole exploring the color “white.”

    So many metaphors in this poem to savor. And I love the “This came to me one morning . . .” And then the marathon runners change direction.

    Reply
    • Bethany R. says

      December 20, 2017 at 12:42 pm

      Interesting about that area of the Lake District and how Wordsworth and Potter mention them, Sandra. I’m glad you looked “whitelessness” up and shared this.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Five Perfect Winter Reads – Bookish Beck says:
    February 5, 2018 at 3:03 am

    […] Further reading on Greenland: A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice by William E. Glassley (see my Foreword review) and The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine, an epic novel about an unconventional priest, set in late-eighteenth-century Denmark and Greenland (see my Nudge review). Also Sinéad Morrissey’s multi-part poem “Whitelessness.” You can read the first stanza of it here. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

For the Writer in You

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our September Menu.

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

Your Comments

  • L.L. Barkat on From A to Z, the Abecedarian Isn’t Just for Chaucer—Poetry Prompt!
  • L.L. Barkat on Poetry Club: Coffee Shop Collage—”Do the Shells Still Hear”
  • Bethany R. on Poetry Club: Coffee Shop Collage—”Do the Shells Still Hear”
  • From A to Z, the Abecedarian Isn't Just for Chaucer—Poetry Prompt! - Tweetspeak Poetry on How to Write an Acrostic Poem Infographic

Join the Year of the Monarch

How to Write Poetry

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Annual Theme 2022: Perspective
  • • Annual Theme 2021: Generous
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2023 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy

We serve poetry with our cookies. Because that's the way it should be.
We serve poetry with your cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you... accept the cookies with a smile.
Do not sell my personal information.
Cookie SettingsAccept
update cookie prefs

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
CookieDurationDescription
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics11 monthsThis cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional11 monthsThe cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary11 monthsThis cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others11 monthsThis cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance11 monthsThis cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy11 monthsThe cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytics
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
Others
Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet.
SAVE & ACCEPT