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).
In her new collection, Light that is both wave and particle, those lyrical qualities and visionary sense have light as their focus. Light bends, spreads and travels on continuously and, depending on how we decide to look, both with it and at it, we see how it becomes local and particular. These are poems concerned with the way light falls on water, the natural world and our fraught place within it and, also, what might suddenly be illuminated by memory, history, the passage of time.
Light that is both wave and particle is published on Maura Dooley's 70th birthday in tandem with Dancing at Oakmead Road: Selected Poems, her choice of poems from earlier collections, from Ivy Leaves & Arrows (1986) to Five Fifty-Five (2023).
Praise for Maura Dooley's poetry:
'Dooley's infinitely delicate poems behave "shyly" but never lose their balance on her tightrope of fine connections.' – Martina Evans, The Irish Times, on Five Fifty-Five
'While there is plenty here about private life, about houses, supportive close relationships, and grief at the loss of friends, what gives this collection of poems its weight and balance is the way it places such concerns as a reflection of larger movements and their historical impact.' – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Poetry Ireland Review, on Five Fifty-Five
'Five Fifty-Five has a sustained set of tender lyrics that work their charm by focusing on moments that leap to gather greater consequence with effortless ease.' – Daljit Nagra, choosing Maura Dooley's sixth collection as his Poetry Extra Poetry Book of the Month, BBC Radio 4 Extra
'Sonically elegant and rich with memorable descriptions and images, the latest from Dooley (after The Silvering) explores the past, mortality, and the silences and omissions that invite deeper reflection on the page... Commanding and quietly layered, these lyrically precise and subtle poems deserve revisiting.' – Maya C. Popa, Publishers' Weekly, on Five Fifty-Five
'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
Maura Dooley at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Maura Dooley reads the poems 'Letters from Yorkshire', 'Out', 'Talks About Talks' and 'Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide', followed by an extract from ‘The Source’. She then reads several poems from Five Fifty-Five: 'Fam', 'Quiver', 'Fine Wind, Clear Morning' and 'The Unforgotten'. Maura ends the reading with her Forward Prize shortlisted poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine’s Heart', from The Silvering, and 'A Bunch of Consolation' from Five Fifty-Five.
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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