You close one eye and put a finger from one hand up in front of your face. Then you put a finger from the other hand up behind it so that it is obscured by the nearer one. Then close your open eye and open the closed one and the further finger has moved into view. That is parallax and although I don't remember much from O level Physics, I do remember that.
We are talking about 'shift', how things look different from different angles, how things change in a new perspective and how, for example, things are no longer like they were when caught in a photograph. The word occurs in Sinead Morrissey's book of poems in a poem called Lighthouse,
it blinks and bats
the swingball of its beam, then stands to catch,
then hurls it out again beyond its parallax.
The poem moves between the very private world of a child's imagination and the big, wide world, as told by his mother. Like many of the poems here, it rewards closer reading, not all of it being available perhaps on first acquaintance. That is how I prefer poems to be, not easily seen off on one peremptory run through but neither so opaque that one never gets far enough with it. And so Sinead Morrissey made more appeal the longer I spent with her book.
I'm never convinced how much a collection needs a theme quite as specific as this and I wouldn't say that every poem here in necessarily a contributor to it but it is a way in and provides a way of interpreting the work if one feels the need of such a thing. As a general rule, I don't, but the thought wasn't completely wasted as I do like to wonder about the significance of a collection's title.
A Day's Blindness was the first to capture my attention. The onset of blindness presents some apparently paradoxical ideas, like,
He would have needed practice
at being blind to pretend to be sighted.
before we are taken back into memory.
These are tough poems, lyrical in an unsentimental way. I am patiently waiting for any new book by Caitriona O'Reilly in the hope that there is one is due one day but these poems remind me of hers in a way that is beyond the fact that they are from Ireland and by a woman and so have filled that gap temporarily. There is a similar austerity about them if these are a bit less haunted.
Shadows considers the poet's shadow cast on a railway station platform in the morning and how it stretches and would alter if she stood there all day. The meditation benefits from a series of luminous images brought forth by the possibilities,
I could be a dissident in a textbook in Soviet Russia
discovered after the print run
and painstakingly blackened out by each teacher,
and it could be the most arresting poem of them all as well as the most easily accessible.
A Lie is a faded photograph. I would have appreciated a short note at the back to shed more light on why F# minor is The Evil Key, but I will have to consult Johann Mattheson. Its sinister discomfiture makes it another outstanding poem. There turned out to be quite a few and there might be more by the time I have to decide which were my favourite poems and books of this year. Parallax and some of its contents seem to be heading for my short list as readily as it is already on some others.