Dancing at Oakmead Road: Selected Poems

By Maura Dooley

Dancing at Oakmead Road: Selected Poems spans almost 40 years of remarkable work from acclaimed UK poet Maura Dooley. This new selection presents her choice of poems from seven collections beginning with Ivy Leaves & Arrows (1986), updating her earlier selection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002, which drew on books including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), with the addition of later poems from Life Under Water (2008), The Silvering (2016) and Five Fifty-Five (2023). Kissing a Bone and Life Under Water were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Maura Dooley's poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her 'sharp and forceful' intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability 'to enact and find images for complex feelings...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 ' (Literary Review).

Dancing at Oakmead Road is published on Maura Dooley's 70th birthday in tandem with a new collection, Light that is both wave and particle.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1780378327
• ISBN13: 9781780378329
• Release Date: July 2027
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books