Maura Dooley was Poet-in-Residence at Jane Austen s home in Chawton, Hampshire. The house, now a museum, is where Austen wrote most of her novels. These poems offer glimpses of Austen’s still potent presence in the modest house in which, at a tiny table, she wrote her greatest works.
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 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. These poems take in the physical landscape, family and friendship, as well as the transience of both folklore and politics. In part, an attempt to speak of what is submerged, they welcome that ‘splash of cold water to the face’ that tells us we’re alive.
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 Maura’s 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’.
