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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Blessures et sentiments : les poèmes de Sinéad Morrissey

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This paper explores the poetry of Sinéad Morrissey (born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, in 1972), one of the most highly regarded of the younger generation of contemporary Irish poets. Taking into account her six collections to date – including There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), The State of the Prisons (2005), Parallax (2013) and On Balance published in 2017, it examines the great variety of poetical strategies – analogy, metaphor, polysemy, play on form and perspective, pictorialism and iconicity, ekphrasis, etc. – that Morrissey uses to tell of most personal experiences (physical pain, exile, loss, pregnancy and motherhood, confrontation with forms of otherness, states of imprisonment, creation) and the wide range of feelings that are associated with them : love, desire, exaltation, insecurity, anxiety, sense of guilt, despair, etc. This paper also aims to show the underlying unity behind this diversity – indirection in diction, enhanced pictorialism and iconicity – and its intercultural origin : Morrissey’s poems indeed reflect a felicitously creative mix between the poet’s native Northern Irish culture and the Japanese culture which she discovered while living in Japan.