Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award Set against a backdrop of ecological & economic instability Sinead Morrissey's sixth collection On Balance revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance & inbalance that have shaped our history The poems also address gender inequality & our inharmonious relationship with the natural world A poem on Lilian Bland
- the first woman to design build & fly her own aeroplane
- celebrates the audacity & ingenuity of a great Irish heroine Elsewhere explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent insistent & in ' Articulation' we are invited to stop & wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon's horse Marengo 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz' suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'