Description
Book SynopsisMaura Dooley’s poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her ‘sharp and forceful’ intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability ‘to enact and find images for complex feelings…Her poems have both great delicacy and an undeniable toughness…she manages to combine detailed domesticity with lyrical beauty, most perfectly in the metaphor of memory ’ (Literary Review). Five Fifty-Five is Maura Dooley’s first new collection since The Silvering (2016). These are quizzical poems concerned with time and mortality which ask fundamental questions about our lives, such as Where have you gone? and Who were you anyway? She tries to find out through conversations with, among others, Louisa M. Alcott, Hokusai, Jane Austen, Buzz Aldrin, Anne Tyler and the Great Uncle and Grandfather she never knew. There are poems, too, about the difficulties and responsibilities of translation, both from the written word and in interpreting what is left unspoken in different kinds of absence; empty streams, bare trees, the loss of friends. Yet these are poems that find and try to offer consolation: 'What have you learned exactly? / To love, to speak up, to hold steady.'
Trade ReviewThe Silvering occupies and explores more deeply the well-planted ground she has made for herself. The poems in this book move with customary reverence between the stripped lyric and something that approaches narrative but never quite becomes it. Her lyrics are often pared back, transformative acts, particularly adept at the making strange... This is not just an act of compression but a master-class in the paradox of elliptical inclusion. And there are many poems in this collection that achieve this. -- Vona Groarke & Tim Liardet * PBS Bulletin *
A collection of elegiac poems that make us think in new ways about absence. Dooley looks at what happens when we encounter the memory of something or someone lost, and records how those memories are fixed, like photographs, in the “silvering”. The emotions revisited are as fresh and powerful as they were when first felt. -- Lavinia Greenlaw * The Week (Best books), on The Silvering *
Mystery, memory, uncertainty are recurring motifs in these (mostly) brief lyrics that both relish our perceptions and doubt their staying power. -- Beverley Bie Brahic * Times Literary Supplement, on The Silvering *
Table of Contents9 Vertaling 10 UnEnglished 11 Her Wish for Big Windows 12 Gaudy Welsh 13 The Blue Willow and the Indian Tree 14 Uncle Tom Writes Home 16 Fam 17 Quiver 18 Abecedarium 19 ∞ 20 Casey, Cullen & the Eighth 21 Tending the Border 22 Restoration 23 A Ruined Castle in Wales 24 Some Things Learnt at Lumb Bank 25 The Rosebud at Jane Austen’s House 26 At the Minster Gate Bookshop 27 L’Heure Bleue 28 Redhead by the Side of the Road 29 Ghost Writer 30 At Orchard House 32 Mayday in Ravenna 33 Come Fill the Cup 34 Mythology 35 Unacknowledged Legislators 36 Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji 39 A Year in Mr Inoue’s Haiku 40 Fine Wind, Clear Morning 41 Song in an Old Tradition 42 Span 43 Counting Down 44 Blink 45 Hard Shoulder 46 The Forests of South London 47 A-Sighing-and-a-Sobbing 48 Autumn in the Absent Elms 49 Seasonal 50 The Unforgotten 51 By Way of Kensal Green 52 In the Blue Vase 53 Did You Know Ann Atkinson? 54 A Haunted House 55 I’ve Been Thinking a Lot About Heaven 56 Five Fifty-Five 57 A Bunch of Consolation 61 Notes 63 Acknowledgements
