Diana Pooley

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Biographical note:  Diana Pooley was brought up in the Queensland outback and worked as an artist and art lecturer in Brisbane and London, where she lives now. Her poems have taken awards, in the Essex Poetry Competition, in the Mslexia Competition, have been published in Poetry London, Smiths Knoll, The North and The Shop, and will be included in ‘Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets’ (Bloodaxe Books 2010 ed. Roddy Lumsden).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715190
ISBN:  9781844715190
Author:  Diana Pooley
Title:  Like This
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jun-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Like This ranges over a number of subjects and uses a variety of forms. There are poems about the Australian outback, visual art, London suburban life and the odd – creatures, people and places of the imagination. ‘What if?’ can be thought of as an introduction to questions that are tackled by this writer in ways that are inventive and accessible.

Some of the poetry related to art is concerned with perception while most of it is about the sense of strangeness artists feel when as work progresses, they find they have stepped over into that world of their evolving sculptures and paintings and the art objects themselves have taken on lives not dissimilar to those of their makers.

Most of the poems about growing up in the Queensland bush are set in the period in the 50s when tracts of land were still being settled, when graziers had to house their families in tin huts and tents and everyone had to contend with floods, dust storms, rat plagues and isolation. The writing, through crisp and sensitive descriptions of the landscape, people and animals, is evocative of the drama brought about by these extreme conditions and by the colour and wonder of it. Other poems in Like This use fish looking through windows, anxiety in Ethiopia, cream cakes, a strawberry fruit gum, Calamity Jane just for the sake of it or, looked at another way, as metaphors for something.

Table of contents:
PART I
Dish The Dirt
Springtime
Listen Amelio
Brisbane, 1962
Maureen
Behind, In, Under, On and Up
Balm
Life Class
Corners
‘Lindisfarne’
Sea Sprite II
Grey Dog Hair
The Collector
At was no angel
Translation
Bears
Marty
Coronation Day
Dear Guenter
Cream Cakes
Craft
Maxine’s Shed
PART II
Diachrony
Singing
Big Brimmed Hats
Mail Day
Bore Water
On Emerald Downs
King
The Fires
Virgil
Showers
Wind
Tuckoo
1956-57
Marriage
Inscriptions
Some Blokes
Musician
At the Hut
Faith, Hope and Charity
Back at Pathungra
PART III
The Bird
marcus and fern
Dead Man’s Hand
Like This
Drawing
Already
It’s the Moles
Message to Jean
July, 1969
Squeegee
In the Name of God Amen
Oscar
Graffiti
Owning Fire
Afternoon in the Park
Dear Gum
The Aerodymanic b Photon Torpedo Launching Mechanism
Let me help you with your problems before it destroys you
First Jersey Tiger in London

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Excerpt from book:  

Owning Fire

Although, from the beyond,
James Parkinson, Charles Penrose,
and Thomas Morton are likely to look down
with a sense of satisfaction
as they point to the places in our books,
on our tongues or in our thoughts
where the words Disease, Drain, and Neuroma,
respectively, are attached to their names,
many consider that, to be coupled forever
with the less corporeal, with effects
(as is the case with Chandrasekhara Raman
or Jean Peltier) would be the more fulfilling?;
others feel that to own cypresses
or rock frogs, in the way Charles Lawson
and Stephen Copland do, has to lead
to affecting memories — yet there are some
who believe the link with fire, the violet
and blue fluorescing of corpusants
must tempt even St Elmo into pride.

Unpublished endorsement:  Diana Pooley has more than her own style — she has her own world. It lives alongside our own and in many ways is our own but through her inimitable tone that is both detached and conversational, it comes into a bright, oblique reality of its own.

This is a poetry that has little time for poetics. The writing is spare, particular, illuminating. It allows quite brilliantly for the odd streak of lyricism so that, as with many of her last lines, just as we feel we might be heading for a fall we are in fact lifted higher than we could have imagined.

Greta Stoddart

Unpublished endorsement:  Like This is the fruit of a startling visual imagination. A shape-shifting writer who can move from full colour sketches of the outback in the 1950s, to unsettling snaps of art world curios, to fabulous mindscapes of unconvention, Diana Pooley has gathered all this into a warming and pleasing first collection which deserves wide attention.

Roddy Lumsden