‘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
