morsels, Susanna Galbraith

morsels is a formally ambitious multi-sequence debut collection from Belfast poet Susanna Galbraith. Galbraith’s innovations on the long poem are engaged with concerns about the impact of climate change, environmental depredation and speciesism on human / animal kinship and the self in relation to the natural world. The opening sequence, ‘bears’ explores the unravelling of romantic and familiar relationships, the unreliability of speech and narrators, and the death of children through the lens of fables and fairy tales. The poems in ‘something the birds mean’ investigate a mother daughter relationship that is both mythic and personal. These poems allude to troubled psyches, illness, anxiety and the impossibility of communication while proffering lyrical meditations on the dynamics of metamorphosis as a counter to breakage and trauma. The final sequence, ‘as though an island, delicately explores isolation and community, travel and exile through the story of two people who leave home for an island.

Galbraith makes sensitive yet tough-minded forays into unstable, ever-evolving territories: landscape and memory, loss and uncertainty, seclusion and transformation. Her experimentation with erasure, structuralist poetics, the folk tale and the poem as visual field is in tune with a voice as fresh and daring as it is assured and elegant. 

Pay attention, these poems seem to say, to the silences, to the half-said, to the almost-thought, to the subtle forces that ‘break the silence into crumbs’. It’s rare to encounter a new voice in poetry that is brave enough to let the silences sing, shrewd enough to sense that what is said in words is so often not what is meant, and humble enough to work in the gaps, the spaces between certainties, where poetry, and life, happen. — Maria Johnston

Inventive and ambitious, morsels is an exquisite study of the silences and lacunae that exist at the heart of our lives. Galbraith captures us at our moments of vulnerability or introspection, and her poems give us space to breathe. Spare, perfectly controlled, and full of vivid images, morsels is a collection to read and remember. — Rosamund Taylor

Published by Macha Press
Softcover
108 pages
210 x 210 mm
ISBN 9781068769924