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The context in which a poem was written can sometimes tell you more about its themes, message and meaning.

Some questions you might ask include:

• Are aspects of the poet’s life reflected in the poem?
• Is the time or place in which it was written reflected in the poem?
• Does the reader need knowledge or understanding of significant events to understand the poem’s real meaning or message?

You will need to research the poet’s background to discover the answers to these questions. But if you do write about a poem and its context, be careful to include only details that reveal something about the poem.

Sinéad Morrissey is an award-winning poet from Co. Armagh in Northern Ireland.

Morrissey was born in 1972. She was raised in Belfast. She studied English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to gain a PhD in eighteenth-century literature. She has travelled widely and lived in various places - including Germany, Japan and New Zealand. She is now Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University in England.

Genetics was published in Morrissey’s third poetry collection, The State of the Prisons, in 2005.

This collection was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Morrissey won this prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2014. She went on to win the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection, On Balance.

Morrissey’s parents separated and moved to different places. This is reflected in the poem and the references to the speaker’s parents and their geographical distance from each other.

Morrissey herself is now married with two children, as touched on in the final stanza of the poem, “take up the skin’s demands/ for mirroring in bodies of the future”.