Poem by Tim Dooley

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Tim Dooley (pictured) this Friday. Dooley has taught in and near London since 1974. He has reviewed poetry for the TLS, and has worked as a creative writing tutor for Arvon, Writers’ Inc and The Poetry School. 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.

Dooley read for the Oxfam poetry series, and appears on Life Lines 2. As a critic, and reviewer, Dooley has long had an eye and ear open to possibilities in poetry and music from across the pond (writing on Ashbery, for instance, as long ago as 1982, in an issue of Poetry Review, and following Bob Dylan's work closely) but he is also aware of British lyric traditions - and this is how the tenderness enters his work - which is often humane, and subtly attentive to linguistic nuance and implication. He's a fine, significant, ludic, open-minded writer, and it's good to see his new book out - Keeping Time. Dooley will read from the new collection on June 10th, with Peter Robinson, at the Calder bookshop.

Sunday Morning

Stevens, MacNeice and The Velvet Underground.
A lightness rising to a cloudless sky.
Too tired for sleep or love we drive together
out of numbness to a different town.
The long ponds where we used to feed the ducks,
the stretch of green that climbs to the cathedral,
the breakfast, the bookshop we trust will
take gravity from us, floating away.

But now the radio plays Haydn, a piece
in F sharp minor, contrived we’re told
to solve a problem in the Esterhazy Court,
so in the last movement the players left
singly, snuffing out their candles, leaving
the last couple to hold the stage alone.

poem by Tim Dooley; reprinted with permission of the author, from his new collection, Keeping Time.

Comments

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