From 'Preface'to Between Here and There

My voice slipped overboard and made it ashore
the day I fished on the sea of Japan
within sight of a nuclear reactor.

At first sight I didn't notice -
my flexible throat full of a foreign language
and my attention on the poison of the puffer fish...

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 clear, dispassionate and disabused.

Between Here and There answers the question where Sinead Morrissey has been since the publication of There Was Fire in Vancouver in 1996. Back in her native Belfast after several years abroad, she has produced a long-awaited second collection strung between four continents. These poems, which constitute a radical departure from her earlier work, move between the surreal artscapes of the American South West, the effects of global warming on a lake outside Auckland, and the graves of miscarried babies in Japan, to the difficulties attendant on the peace process in Northern Ireland and the instability of the devolved Assembly. Robust, surprising and technically accomplished, Between Here and There builds towards the critically-acclaimed Japanese sequence featured in New Poetries II. Avoiding the better-travelled paths of the Zen / Haiku traditions in Western poetry, Morrissey instead explores a world of heavy industry, environmental damage, disaffected schoolchildren and a traditional village culture vibrant with raw sexual energy.

'Sinead Morrissey's sequence about Japan must be read by everyone who loves poetry.' - Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph.