The Silvering
Published on 24. March 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-78037-094-1 (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). The Silvering is her first new collection since Life Under Water, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2008. Looking in, looking out, looking through are the recurring perspectives offered by these poems. These are poems interested in shifting light and what it reveals, reflects or conceals and especially, perhaps, in what remains 'caught in the silvering'. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Reviews / Votes
'Dooley uses her poems to look down at what's submerged - by memory, words, grief - and shows us a world subtly rippled and distorted, in which everyday objects are "made strange" and nothing, when you reach in a hand, is quite where you expected it to be.' - Sarah Crown, Guardian; 'This deceptively delicate, often very tender poet: how she marries spare lyrical cadences with political scepticism, packing a whole gamut of wit and sharp observation into very little space.' - Ruth Padel, Financial TimesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
113 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-094-1 (9781780370941)
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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 latest collection, The Silvering, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). 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.