MORSELS by Susanna Galbraith

morsels is a formally ambitious multi-sequence debut collection from Belfast poet Susanna Galbraith. Galbraith’s innovations on the long poem form range from a chorus of fragmented yet confluent voices held in tension by repetition and verbal slippage, through lyrical meditations on mothering, daughtering and the dynamics of metamorphosis. The title series ‘morsels’ explores the ways language and its absences shape our relationships with one another, with natural environments, and with human and animal bodies. Across three interconnected sequences, Galbraith makes sensitive yet tough-minded forays into unstable, ever-evolving territories: love, death and memory, loss and anxiety, isolation and transformation, and the craft of poetry making.

With a keen ear for the incantatory power of words and the aural complexity of self-referential text, Galbraith’s sequences build meaning via networks of association that are at once formally bold and tantalisingly elusive, profoundly emotive and intellectually sharp. 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.

Published by Macha Press
Edition of 500
108 pages
210 mm x 210 mm
ISBN 9781068769924