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.'

About the Author
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.

Reviews
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781780376578
Author Maura Dooley
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 138mm * 7mm