
Five Fifty-Five
Maura Dooley(Author)
Bloodaxe Books Ltd (Publisher)
Published on 27. April 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-78037-657-8 (ISBN)
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.'
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.'
Reviews / Votes
The 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 *More details
Edition
Paperback original
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
sewn/stitched
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
94 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-657-8 (9781780376578)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Maura Dooley was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, worked for some years in Yorkshire, and has lived in London for the past 25 years. She is a freelance writer and lectures at Goldsmiths' College. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, and How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren. Her selection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002, was published by Bloodaxe in 2002, drawing on collections including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone and her later collection Life Under Water, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2008, were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine's Heart' was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2015, and was included in her collection, The Silvering (2016), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. Her translation (with Elhum Shakerifar) of Azita Ghahreman's Negative of a Group Photograph (Farsi title: ?????? ?? ??? ???? ????) was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2018. Negative of a Group Photograph was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019. A new collection, Five Fifty-Five, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023.
Content
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
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