Keeping Time

Reviews / Votes

You know how you and your family went on that European trip when you were a kid and how, when you got back, ice cream seemed common next to the gelato you'd had in Palermo and your mother's mashed potatoes were kind of lame when compared to the bangers and mash you'd eaten in Cork? Well, as it turns out, a lot of books get published abroad that don't really reach our fair shores, and many of them are great. Among those publishers who are better known on the other side of the pond is Salt Publishing, and the contemporary poetry they're publishing is pretty exciting stuff. Tim Dooley's latest collection comes out in July, and there's more than a strong case to be made that Dooley should be read in the colonies. He's colloquial, he's smart, his work is intelligent and sometimes difficult. Plus, you could tell people that you're reading Tim Dooley, and when they say, "Who?" you can roll your eyes, sip your drink and shake your head knowingly. * L Magazine * Tim Dooley has a wide-ranging literary mind ... but these poems are anything but `literary' in effect - their anecdotes and settings, references and details are very much of the here-and-now ... There is a keen political awareness at work in many pieces...several poems take on the implications of that sobering mantra of a now-historical era, `The personal is political'. But it is what has happened since ... in brief third-person narratives, in sketches of lives adrift and hopes under threat. It makes for a poetry of thoughtful unshowy resonance, that can also be very funny. -- Alan Jenkins and Eva Salzman * PBS Bulletin *