Tim Dooley

Biographical note:  Tim 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.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713332
ISBN:  9781844713332
Author:  Tim Dooley
Title:  Keeping Time
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Oct-08
Extent:  72pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  108 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  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.

Meet the author:

Podcasts

Play Digital (436 KB)


Play Echoes (1.2 MB)


Play Out (1.9 MB)


Play Southerly (872 KB)


Play The Secret Ministry (1.3 MB)


Play The TPA Bar (724 KB)

Table of contents:
In the palm of my hand
The length of spring
Cellular
Digital
The TPA Bar
In the Street
Y Habra Trabajo Para Todos
The briefcase
Itinerants
The Milky Way
June
Preparing to meet the day
September
Resistance
Mrs. Wu
The Cavalcantine Lure
Song
Southerly
Tityus
For Ernest Seigler
Delivery
Seeing Shelley Plain
The Folding Star
The Next Poem
Snow Days
Detente
The Unburdening Room
Conduit
Sleepwalker’s Romance
Class
Afterwards
A Postcard from the Fifties
Chez Haynes
Tenderness
Echoes
Yes it is
Brief Encounter
Another Part of the City
Edit
Narcissus
Directive
Pornography
Out
A Salesman in the Lakes
The Hammer
Self-Criticism
Customs of the Province
Aspinall’s Zoo
Heritage
The Border
The Tambourica Player’s Wife
Revenants
The Secret Ministry
Sunday Morning
That Year

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (64 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

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.

Review quote:  You know how you and your family went on that European trip when you were a kid and how, when you got back, ice cream seemed common next to the gelato you’d had in Palermo and your mother’s mashed potatoes were kind of lame when compared to the bangers and mash you’d eaten in Cork? Well, as it turns out, a lot of books get published abroad that don’t really reach our fair shores, and many of them are great. Among those publishers who are better known on the other side of the pond is Salt Publishing, and the contemporary poetry they’re publishing is pretty exciting stuff. Tim Dooley’s latest collection comes out in July, and there’s more than a strong case to be made that Dooley should be read in the colonies. He’s colloquial, he’s smart, his work is intelligent and sometimes difficult. Plus, you could tell people that you’re reading Tim Dooley, and when they say, “Who?” you can roll your eyes, sip your drink and shake your head knowingly.

L Magazine

Previous review quote:  Dooley seems to me among the handful of writers today trying to work towards a serious, intelligent poetry of the people – something that is neither frivolous verse nor poetry built for the seminar room.

Peter Sansom
Orbis

Previous review quote:  Tim Dooley’s poems are about the ordinary activity of trying to live a good life where that word good is subject to many temptations … Needless, perhaps, to say, but I think some of these poems good indeed.

Peter Robinson
The Many Review

Previous review quote:  The invitation Dooley offers is to take it all in. That done, there are all kinds of rewards – not only the slow piecing together of reactions and responsibilities, but a wary sense of humour, quiet enough to be missed if you don’t stop to listen.

Philip Gross
Poetry Review

Previous review quote:  It’s not usual to put a book down feeling that only now do you know how to read it, how to pick up the wit and atmosphere.

Peter Porter
The Observer

Previous review quote:  This admirable volume rises to the challenge of contemporary lethargy.

Martin Dodsworth
The Guardian

Previous review quote:  Tim Dooley’s first collection is an impressive one. Moving in and around the world it creates, his language attempts to come back to a sense of what is personally real … feeling and language fall over each other in an attempt to find the truth

John Lees
Iron

Previous review quote:  Tim Dooley … strikes the familiar disciplined private note but goes beyond the classic gentilities and is open to discontinuities of feeling. The measured, meditative manner sometimes quickens … into loping inclusiveness of definition, or breaks out in arresting tight-lipped urgencies (including urgent uncertainties) of perception

Claude Rawson
TLS

Previous review quote:  Dooley’s sum exceeds his image-making parts. Exploiting the lightly-clad pamphlet’s ability to flit beneath our radar he targets, from unexpected angles, such ‘big’ themes as historicity and 9-11. Suffused with humane politics, Tenderness enacts its title in the way it moves through both popular and literary motifs (vinyl discs, Narcissus) to close-stitch its fabric with subtle effects. Amalgamating poise and intellect with a thoughtful pacing of each poem’s release, Dooley injects his words into their precision mouldings with a characteristically delicate and perceptive pressure.

Mario Petrucci
PBS Bulletin

Previous review quote:  A good poem has a translucent surface, letting the reader in, keeping back its mysteries and surprises for a deeper reading … The best poems are superb.

Gillian Clarke
Smith/Doorstop Prize Commendation

Previous review quote:  Here are the poems of a ‘thinking’ man …filled with a form of bourgeois compromise Yet I am fascinated by the occasions when such poetry as this seems to surpass its own structure and click a switch in my yawning brain. It happens (here) in the poet’s consideration of aspects of the deregulated workplace.

Tim Allen
Terrible Work