‘I cannot rub this strangeness from my sight’: Contemporary Belfast and Sinéad Morrissey's Through the Square Window

Focussing on the poems in Sinead Morrissey's Through the Square Window (2009), this essay examines how the poet envisions a transformed, post-troubles Belfast through a range of perspectives, shifting her attention away from but not entirely forgetting the ways in which the past impinges on the present. The result is a poetry that is to some extent free from the political imperatives that have confronted earlier generations of Northern Irish poets and apprehends Belfast's landscape and urban geography in fresh ways and incorporates a more cosmopolitan and post-national consciousness.