A Private Mythology is Stephen Morrissey’s ninth book of poetry. He is also the author of several poetry chapbooks and numerous book reviews. Morrissey is gathering his essays on poetry for book publication, entitled All Art is Vision. Morrissey’s body of work is an important part of the rich poetic tradition of English-speaking Quebec writers.
Stephen Morrissey is a poet of the various ways in which family experience manifests itself, whether in love, in conflict, or in the generations of a family’s history. Ancestors, the human psyche, salvation through self-revelation, life’s spiritual dimension: these are all themes and concerns in his poetry. For Morrissey, writing poetry is the expression of his life-long journey to meaning and redemption. He is the sixth generation of his family in Canada, his ancestors having arrived here from Ireland in the late 1830s.

Stephen Morrissey earned his B.A., Honours English with Distinction, at Concordia University. He studied with poet and scholar Louis Dudek at McGill University, earning an M.A. in English Literature. While at McGill, he was awarded the Peterson Memorial Prize in English Literature. Morrissey’s literary papers are archived at McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections in the McLennan Library. The Government of Quebec named an island in northern Quebec after a phrase from one of Morrissey’s poems, “la vingt-septième lettre.”

Visit the poet at www.stephenmorrissey.ca.

These confessional, discursive poems are richly emotive, accumulating energy… Morrissey’s poems build to their conclusions, which then open to larger associations. Morrissey’s lines of stainless steel gleam with a dangerous, piercing beauty.
~ George Elliott Clarke, Books in Canada

I would like to say of Stephen Morrissey’s poetry that it strikes me very much as the real thing.
~ Louis Dudek, Introduction to The Trees of Unknowing