Five Fifty-Five
Description
Five Fifty-Five is a book of 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? In her first new collection since The Silvering (2016), Maura Dooley 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.
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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
'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]
'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 ' - Adam Thorpe, Literary Review
