Sinéad Morrissey’s most recent collection of poems, Parallax, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry in late 2013, opens by defining its title via the Oxford English Dictionary as, “the angular amount of … displacement or difference of position, being the angle contained between the two straight lines drawn to the object from the two different points of view, and constituting a measure of the distance of the object.” Morrissey’s citation of this precise definition implies the role of subjectivity in poetry — not only determining the distance and perspective of the subject to the object studied in poetry, but also how determining that perspective contributes to the holistic meaning of a poem.
Morrissey views her subject matter from many angles, allowing her poems to express and incorporate multiple viewpoints. For instance, in “Baltimore,” the speaker, while watching the television series The Wire, imagines a world in which her daughter and other neighborhood children “playing on the street … [in] the staggered light” are contrasted with the “freakish pitch of Westside Baltimore / on The Wire, its sirens and gunfire / its beleaguered cops haranguing kids /as young as six for propping up / the dealers on the corners.” The innocence of the neighborhood children, visible on the street, is juxtaposed with the darkness and criminality of six-year olds hustling drugs. The loud “sirens and gunfire” of Baltimore City depicted on The Wire is at odds with the end of the poem, in which the speaker observes a still pond in “infant sleep.” Morrissey’s ability to combine multiple angles of observation in her poetry is evident in “Lighthouse,” in which the speaker allegorizes the parallax between a cruise ship and a lighthouse on a lake with her inability to hear her son’s conversations with a friend outside. Morrissey describes the two boys as existing in “a world that can’t be entered …. in a sort of boy-talk conversation / no one else can hear.”
Morrissey’s focus on the implications of distance and perspective in Parallax often leads her to embrace diverse philosophical concepts and ideas. “Daughter” describes a mother imagining her daughter’s dreams in language; in the mother’s varying visions, the daughter grows up in a Japanese pictograph, partners with a black rat to tease a gnome, and acquires linguistic and symbolic knowledge in a manner not dissimilar to what one might experience through the use of psychedelics. At other times, Morrissey’s gaze turns toward the body and bodily functions. In “Home Birth,” Morrissey’s speaker worries about the possibility of becoming ill from a Cryptosporidium infection in her small intestine during a water birth; contrastingly, “A Day’s Blindness” sees Morrissey comparing the faint light on a cold December’s night to “the pale blue flicker of a pilot light / in a boiler’s black intestine.”
While Morrissey’s book generally engages personal and social matters, Parallax also examines realms of the political. Musing on a puzzle of a 1766 European map in “Jigsaw,” the speaker observes the borders between countries only to determine that those borders signify that a “Europe Divided in its Kingdoms / Shall be reconfigured, whole.” Although Europe is “whole” in the poem, Morrissey starkly contrasts the other continents in a critique of imperial bias: a label at bottom of the map reads “Part of Africa”; Asia is incompletely rendered, literally “rolling off” the boundaries of the puzzle. Morrissey’s critique of Western geography appears to demonstrate the negative consequences of disregarding the importance of parallax. Without perspective, discrimination against the unfamiliar goes unchecked. And in “V is for Vietnam,” Morrissey depicts majestic buildings, erected by the colonial power, in which Vietnamese women wash away wounds from bomb shrapnel; meanwhile, the speaker’s stepfather, a Vietnam War veteran, asphyxiates from PTSD-related thoughts of fighting in the jungle. Both the women and the stepfather survive, but with lines like, “The ones that survive are amphibian,” the speaker implies that each image is aware of the other — suggesting that a common ground exists between those who are involved colonialism and those who are victimized by it.
Parallax not only illustrates the importance of maintaining perspective in observation, but also underscores the salience of perspective in the reading process. Poetry expands the notions of parallax and distance to contextualize the influence of social, historical and political events on the realms of the personal and familial. Through this expanded view, Parallax teaches the reader how to approach and observe subjects in a world of diverse phenomena.
Vasu Venkata is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Southern California. His research interests include Irish literature, Modernism, Marxist theory, and the connections between literature, culture, and developments in international relations and state development. Currently, he is at work on his doctoral dissertation, which investigates the intersection between Irish nationalist literature, models of post-colonial resistance, and the construction of the Irish nation-state.
