‘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

‘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

'I feel that the special gift of all the writing in Five Fifty-Five is to refresh and heighten our perceptions. Dooley’s talent for metaphor gives her writing imaginative drive in a very obvious way. More elusively, her poetry’s enchanting of the world depends on an indefinable rightness, beauty, evocativeness in the very sound and flow of her lines, and on her tact in surrounding words with pauses and breathing spaces within which the reader’s own thoughts can grow.' - Edmund Prestwich, London Grip

'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, Poetry Extra Poetry Book of the Month, BBC Radio 4 Extra

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. Several of her previous Bloodaxe collections have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone and Life Under Water were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. 

    9     Vertaling
    10     UnEnglished
    11     Her Wish for Big Windows
    12     Gaudy Welsh
    13     The Blue Willow and the Indian Tree
    14     Uncle Tom Writes Home
    16     Fam
    17     Quiver
    18     Abecedarium
    19     ∞
    20     Casey, Cullen & the Eighth
    21     Tending the Border
    22     Restoration
    23     A Ruined Castle in Wales
    24     Some Things Learnt at Lumb Bank
    25     The Rosebud at Jane Austen’s House
    26     At the Minster Gate Bookshop
    27     L’Heure Bleue
    28     Redhead by the Side of the Road
    29     Ghost Writer
    30     At Orchard House
    32     Mayday in Ravenna
    33     Come Fill the Cup
    34     Mythology
    35     Unacknowledged Legislators
    36     Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
    39     A Year in Mr Inoue’s Haiku
    40     Fine Wind, Clear Morning
    41     Song in an Old Tradition
    42     Span
    43     Counting Down
    44     Blink
    45     Hard Shoulder
    46     The Forests of South London
    47     A-Sighing-and-a-Sobbing
    48     Autumn in the Absent Elms
    49     Seasonal
    50     The Unforgotten
    51     By Way of Kensal Green
    52     In the Blue Vase
    53     Did You Know Ann Atkinson?
    54     A Haunted House
    55     I’ve Been Thinking a Lot About Heaven
    56     Five Fifty-Five
    57     A Bunch of Consolation

    61     Notes
    63     Acknowledgements