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Five Fifty-Five
Five Fifty-Five
Five Fifty-Five
Ebook68 pages23 minutes

Five Fifty-Five

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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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 27, 2023
ISBN9781780376585
Five Fifty-Five
Author

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.

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    Book preview

    Five Fifty-Five - Maura Dooley

    Cover: Five Fifty-Five by 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

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