Five Fifty-Five
By Maura Dooley
()
About this ebook
Five Fifty-Five is a book of 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? In her first new collection since The Silvering (2016), Maura Dooley 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.
Maura Dooley
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 is included in her latest collection, The Silvering, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was published by Bloodaxe in March 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: نگاتیو یک عکس دسته جمعی) is published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in October 2018.
Related to Five Fifty-Five
Related ebooks
Black Heart, Ivory Bones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sky Is Shooting Blue Arrows: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLandfall 231: Aotearoa New Zealand Arts and Letters, Autumn 2016 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Fog Garden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anne's House of Dreams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5That Derrida Whom I Derided Died: Poems 2013–2017 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wagtail's Tale: Collected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Floating Garden: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shadows of the Seven Sins: The Seven Sins Series, #5 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Woman Who Married a Bear: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Short Stories A-Z Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChaotic Angels: Poems in English Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Vampire: The Last Vampire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFriends With The Enemy: a memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSentences and Rain Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Pulitzer Prize Poetry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCeltic Woman: A Memoir of Life's Poetic Journey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Darling: New & Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When the Heart Needs a Stunt Double Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Flood Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Heirloom Language: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsthis One Wild Place Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Alphabet Not Unlike the World: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen the Tree Falls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/552 YA Books Every Book Lover Should Read: A One Year Recommended Reading List from the American Library Association Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetry of Dora Sigerson Shorter - Volume VI - Uncollected Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLara Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Hint of Witchcraft: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sun and Her Flowers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf: A New Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEdgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Five Fifty-Five
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Five Fifty-Five - Maura Dooley
MAURA DOOLEY
Five Fifty-Five
Maura Dooley’s poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. 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 relatives 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.’
‘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.’
– VONA GROARKE & TIM LIARDET, PBS Bulletin
‘A collection of elegiac poems that make us think in new ways about absence… The emotions revisited are as fresh and powerful as they were when first felt.’– LAVINIA GREENLAW, The Week
Cover linocut: The Tube Train (c. 1932) by Cyril E. Power
Photo © The Fine Art Society,London, UK / Bridgeman Images
Maura Dooley was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, worked for some years in Yorkshire, and has lived in London for the