On Balance

"Yes, and she’s a big celebrity in Belfast because of it, which is deeply encouraging. What I like about Morrissey is that she moves forward. She is aware of the need to interrogate where you are at any given time. And she draws on the past. Her winning collection On Balance is largely about giving the past a voice and also drawing attention to the impossibility of knowing whether or not that voice is correct. It’s provisional. I like the precariousness of the book’s subject matter, like the aeroplane built by the early twentieth-century aviator Lilian Bland, which was called the Mayfly, and which, of course, may fly or may not fly. You constantly feel she is happy to be tentative. She’s not the kind of poet who makes definitive statements in the voice of God, ‘This is an announcement. This is the world. I give it to you.’ I think that’s generosity in her writing and I notice this particularly because part of the Forward Prize is to do with reaching new audiences. We give school children the chance to write about these poems and we make a little ebook of shortlisted poems that we distribute for free. A lot of these teenagers took flight from Morrissey’s poems, using her writing to inspire their own. There is a popular illusion about contemporary poetry that it’s very hard, unapproachable and deliberately obscure, but it’s clear from seeing how the children responded to Morrissey’s work, that they didn’t feel that at all. Ocean Vuong was the other poet that these students responded to with such enormous readiness. And they were writing not just critical essays but their own poetry. Yes, it’s part of the communication. Communication is not one way with a poem, it is two-way and that’s what I love most about it and why I would offer poetry as a model for literature at the moment. Well, I think there’s Louis MacNeice there, which I suppose is inevitable because of the Northern Irish connection. But there is one funny poem called “Perfume” which has all these teenage girls wetting themselves at a Beatles concert, and that made me think she had read a lot of Larkin. She’s also influenced by Les Murray. But out of all these voices, she makes her own voice and she is a bewitching speaker. I’ve seen her perform four times including at Buckingham Palace. She owns the space in which she speaks."