The Silvering

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 is her first new collection since 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’. 'Dooley uses her poems to look down at what's submerged - by memory, words, grief - and shows us a world subtly rippled and distorted, in which everyday objects are "made strange" and nothing, when you reach in a hand, is quite where you expected it to be.’ - Sarah Crown, Guardian ‘This deceptively delicate, often very tender poet: how she marries spare lyrical cadences with political scepticism, packing a whole gamut of wit and sharp observation into very little space.’ - Ruth Padel, Financial Times