In her second book of poems Sinead Morrissey's worlds grow more diverse, encompassing the Orient, the Antipodes, America and an Ireland which recent history has changed and yet not deeply, a country observed through eyes that travel and time have made dispassionate and disabused.

Fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood are themes explored in this collection of poems, which are by turns tender, exuberant, and unsettling. Pitched against envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts from Aristotle s theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll s Alice that amplify the depth of the collection. These selections are an examination of motherhood and infancy, which is the rich and contested territory in which what it means to be human in a precarious world is disclosed."

Capturing David Niven on a magical marble escalator to heaven in 1946, recording L. S. Lowry s studio after his death, and peering into the illicit worlds of the Victorian Mutoscope, these poems document what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs are arrested in time by photography. Assured and unsettling, Sinead Morrissey s poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read, and misread in the surfaces of the presented world."

Sinead Morrissey's poems consider spectacular feats of human engineering from our radically unstable perspective.