E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The superb Irish poet Sinead Morrissey (who has read for the London Oxfam series in Marylebone and is pictured here) wrote one of the finest poetry collections of 2005, The State of the Prisons . It is now short-listed for a major UK prize for the best book by an author under the age of 35. Several of the poems in the collection are among the handful of the very best written in English since 2000 and one or two at least will endure. May she win. http://www.booktrust.org.uk/prizes/jlr/jlr.php

Sinead Morrissey was born in Portadown in 1972 and read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. In 1990 she received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry and in 1996 she won an Eric Gregory Award for the manuscript of her first book, There was Fire in Vancouver (Carcanet, 1996). Her second book, Between Here and There (2002) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award. She lived and worked in Japan and New Zealand and now lives in Northern Ireland, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast. Her most recent collection, The State of the Prisons , was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. * From time to time, I'll be leaving notes, comments, and very brief reviews here, regarding collections of poetry I am currently reading - very unofficial and not at all meant to summarize or in fact review at all. The first in this occasional series is The State of the Prisons , by Sinead Morrissey (see above). I haven...