Full Description
Maura 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.'
Contents
9 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
