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Sinéad Morrissey's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Sinéad Morrissey recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Sinéad Morrissey's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Complete Poems 1927-1979

Elizabeth Bishop | 4.35

Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet." In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.

Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes...

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Recommended by Sinéad Morrissey, and 1 others.

Sinéad MorrisseyShe is absolutely true to observed experience and she’s extremely wary of the grand rhetorical gesture. She’s kind of a quiet poet and I think her language is intensely beautiful. (Source)

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2

The Beauty of the Husband

A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

Anne Carson | 4.28

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make... more
Recommended by Sinéad Morrissey, and 1 others.

Sinéad MorrisseyIt’s very unconventional as a poetry collection because it’s actually a novel. She has that novelist’s knack of making you turn the page and there is such radiant poetic language. (Source)

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3

Autumn Journal

Louis MacNeice | 4.56

Written between August and December 1938, this is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months; the trivia of everyday life set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain. Originally published in 1996. less
Recommended by Sinéad Morrissey, and 1 others.

Sinéad MorrisseyMacNiece is a hugely important writer and I feel very proud that he came from Northern Ireland. I think Autumn Journal is such a superb tour de force. (Source)

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4

Translations from the Natural World

Les Murray | 3.82

Not only the migrating birds speak in Translations from the Natural World. The imprisoned species of pigs use their slum language; ravens, cuttlefish, sunflowers and a shell-back tick are among those non-verbal members of our natural world which find distinctive voices in this new collection of poems by Les Murray. Few poets could achieve such variety of approach to express character and feelings and to give us their vision of the universe. Les Murray also includes the human animal in the poems which begin and conclude the collection. less
Recommended by Sinéad Morrissey, and 1 others.

Sinéad MorrisseyThere’s a long sequence in the middle where the poems are either about or in the voice of a different living organism, from a yard horse to a sunflower, and what I love is the audacity. (Source)

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5

Breaking News

Ciaran Carson | 4.24

Few poets can alter readers’ orientation as radically as does Ciaran Carson. In Breaking News, this former master of the long line employs two- and three-syllable lines to alter tempo, the time of his narrative, and the distinction between separate wars and eras. The imperial past, which haunts Belfast in its Crimean place-names, its violence, and its scissorblade meeting of different cultures, bleeds into the present. In many of these poems Carson brings into a visual and tactile present of smell and sound and taste radical revisions of paintings, other poems, and bulletins of a war... more
Recommended by Sinéad Morrissey, and 1 others.

Sinéad MorrisseyI just think it’s a superbly unified book, which both comes out of previous poetic concerns and extends them and builds on them. It’s my favourite Ciaran Carson collection. (Source)

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