BOOKS / Contemporary Poets: 12 Maura Dooley
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Your support makes all the difference.Maura Dooley's poetry subtly reflects the tensions and contradictions implicit in being an Irish writer living in England. Politics, though rarely the overt subject of her work, suffuses her poems, in which detailed domesticity, lyricism and a sophisticated intelligence combine to beguiling and arresting, but always unpretentious, effect. Her first full-length collection of poems, Explaining Magnetism, was published by Bloodaxe last year.
HISTORY
It's only a week but already you are slipping
down the cold black chute of history. Postcards.
Phonecalls. It's like never having seen the Wall,
except in pieces on the dusty shelves of friends.
Once I queued for hours to see the moon in a box
inside a museum, so wild it should have been kept
in a zoo at least but there it was, unremarkable,
a pile of dirt some god had shaken down.
I wait for your letters now: a fleet of strange cargo
with news of changing borders, a heart's small
journeys. They're like the relicts of a saint.
Opening the dry white papers is kissing a bone.
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