Maura Dooley

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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 follows her previous collection 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’.

'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

‘I’d also recommend Maura Dooley’s The Silvering, a book of reflective and deceptively simple verse, lyrically beautiful, sharp and observant.’ – Tracey Thorn, New Statesman (Summer Reads 2016)

‘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]

‘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

 

Maura Dooley reads seven poems

Maura Dooley reads seven poems: ‘Up on the Roof’, ‘What Every Woman Should Carry’, ‘History’, ‘Dancing at Oakmead Road’ and ‘Freight’ from Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002 (2002) and ‘The Elevator’ from Life Under Water (2008). Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Maura Dooley in London on 8 October 2007. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (2008). 

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