Keeping Time (Salt Modern Poets) - Hardcover

Dooley, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844713334 ISBN 13: 9781844713332

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION. Elegant, interesting, fluent, funny and wise, Tim Dooley’s new collection Keeping Time brings together lyrics and fragmentary narratives, the remembered and the imagined, in poems whose every line seems balanced as if with a spirit level. In a special issue of Agenda on ‘The State of Poetry’, Dooley wrote ‘the condition of poetry isn’t soliloquy but colloquy, a conversation that’s been going on before the poem starts, and is capable of being joined and continued by others.’ Keeping Time reflects this plural, provisional vision. New vocabularies of social and technological change cohabit with after-images of traditional literary forms. Key public events of recent years are explored alongside recurring timeless themes. First- and third person- pieces accompany narratives whose protagonists slip slyly from one poem to another. This is a poetry of light and movement that captures the reader’s attention in unexpected ways.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Dooley was born in 1951 and grew up in the West Country. He read English at Oxford and has a research MA in Victorian Poetry from the Open University. He has taught English and Film Studies, in schools and in Further Education, in London and Hertfordshire since 1974. He is reviews and features editor of Poetry London and has worked as a creative writing tutor for Arvon, Writers’ Inc and The Poetry School. He has reviewed poetry for the TLS and co-edited the little magazine Green Lines. His first collection, The Interrupted Dream, was published by Anvil in 1985. This was followed by The Secret Ministry (2001) and Tenderness (2004), both winners in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. Tenderness was also a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. Along with Keeping Time, which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for Winter 2008, Imagined Rooms brings together the poems Tim Dooley wishes to keep from four decades of writing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Conduit

A stone’s throw
from Fleet
Ditch the
plastic cup of
wine taken
from me and a
face I start
to recompose
We are Nabis
of the text. Mr
4 a.m.’s dark
glasses share a
flat December
surface with
poems of failed
marriage, a
balcony open to
night’s cries,
flecks in the
retina, urine
examined for
portents.
It has been
taken from me,
the beautiful
skin tones of
the young,
gull-shrieks off
the Atlantic,
a child lost
in walkways of
dapple grey.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844713334
• ISBN 13: 9781844713332
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80