The Colours of the Irish Flag



A few months after I participated in the Montreal Gazette's online video poetry reading, recorded by Dave Sidaway (a Gazette photographer) in the summer of 2009, I noticed this photograph taken by Dave published in the Gazette. Of course, I wondered, if my poem was being referred to... You can still see the video, there's a link in the box on the right hand side of the screen you're looking at now, under "Morrissey Online".

Girouard Avenue (1)

A 1998 photo of Stephen Morrissey in front of 
2226 Girouard Avenue, his grandmother's front door is
directly behind him. 

In a few days my new book of poems, Girouard Avenue, will be published. I believe that this is my best work as a poet, my first book of new poems in eleven years. My last book, Mapping the Soul, New and Selected Poems, was published by the Muses' Company in Winnipeg in 1998. For the next while I will publish information on the book, as well as a special feature, new photographs of 2226 Girouard Avenue, after which the book was titled.

Some of the poems in the book are already online; for instance, "Hoolahan's Flat, Oxford Avenue," can be found in its entirety as an online chapbook at http://www.coraclepress.com/

The book's epilogue, "The Colours of the Irish Flag," can be found at the site of the Montreal Gazette. It is a video of me reading the poem, so this might be of interest to some readers.