Life under Water
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 new 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 was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, worked for some years in Yorkshire, and has lived in London for the past 25 years. She is a freelance writer and lectures at Goldsmiths’ College. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, and How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren. Her selection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002, was published by Bloodaxe in 2002, drawing on collections including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone and her later collection Life Under Water, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2008, were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine's Heart' was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2015, and was included in her latest collection, The Silvering, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. Her translation (with Elhum Shakerifar) of Azita Ghahreman's Negative of a Group Photograph (Farsi title: ?????? ?? ??? ???? ????) was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2018.
