Eleanor Cooke

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Biographical note:  Eleanor Cooke was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and educated at Birmingham University. When the youngest of her four children was two and the oldest seventeen, she began to set aside part of each day to writing, rediscovering the poetic voice that she had largely neglected – apart from brief episodes of love poetry – since her student days. After winning the Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society Prize, she was invited by Seren to submit the first of her collections, A Kind of Memory, in 1988.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717514
ISBN:  9781844717514
Author:  Eleanor Cooke
Title:  The Return
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Oct-10
Extent:  64pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  4 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  This poet blends breath-taking imaginative flights with an earthy physicality. Essentially love poems from first to last page, Eleanor Cooke’s poetry is set largely in England – the England we’d like to return to; but an England where the dark is ever-present, and there’s no escape from the present or the past.

Main description:  The Return is Eleanor Cooke's first full length collection since The Secret Files (Jonathan Cape, 1994) a book-length narrative sequence that re-told The Annunciation as part feminist myth, part circus fantasy, and sold out in weeks. These new poems take the reader once again into the heart of gothic folk-narrative, direct, sensual, and supernatural; but this time it's all true.

Eleanor Cooke’s poetry, whether lamenting a lost wilderness or re-writing the story of the Annunciation, has always been dense with allusion, apocrypha and an almost pagan celebration of the living spirit in all nature. The Return is the story of the poet’s own return to the home village where she has lived most of her life, to a sense of connectedness, a multi-layering of the past and present that creates a complex route-map of the soul, memories and visions of old love surfacing out of the landscape itself, along with visitations from the living and the dead. This is the collection that finally brings together the poet’s characteristic direct physicality with a sense of place in a rich and intensely personal narrative.

Starting with the story of the return itself, the collection travels through time, charting the loss of innocence, of youth, of time itself, and ending through a trick of time-travel, in a narrative sequence that sees the ghost of William Blake wandering the streets of contemporary London in the company of a Baglady no less visceral than himself. The inhabitants of these poems, like the ancient heroes of ballads and folktales, can bear any amount of reality, gathering up the parallel worlds of the ancient gods and the land itself, the present and the past, like the scraps of history and belief the Baglady carries through the streets, conversing with the ever-present dead.

Table of contents:
Lileth
The Return
In Answer to your Question
Cuply
Gallantry
Assignation
Wound
Desiderium: a longing for a thing once possessed
Trace
Lifting the Lid
Stationary Moment of Displacement
Something as Corny as That
lower case
Help
A Small Explosive Surprise
He Sleeps
Practising Trans-substantiation
Help
Twenty-one Grams
Navigator
Tap, Tap
Message
The House of the Inventor
Fever Sheet
The Girl Next Door
The House of the Inventor
Diagnosis
After School
From the Train
Model
Ritual: Sunday Dinner
Picnic in Bavaria
The Camp
Investigations and Seagulls
Moment
Speedwell: letter to Ellen
Mr. Blake and the Baglady
Mr Blake and the Baglady
The Bag
The Bag
Godric and the Adder
Minus Six Centigrade
That Bird
What it’s for
Under the House
Missing Person
Her Hands
Epilogue
The Eye and the Laureate: River Thames, London, 2510

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Excerpt from book:  

The House of the Inventor

for David

It’s snowing through the hole in the ceiling.
Flakes of sky fall on my pillow.
I climb out of the attic window

carrying a kettle of boiling water
to thaw the pipes. In a drift of steam
below me in the garden the landlord

hacks at the frozen earth
trying to retrieve an abandoned prototype.
I am living in the house of the inventor.

He comes inside with a length of flex,
broken bricks, an adaptor of sorts
and a bakelite globe — ”a pig-breeder”.

He plugs it in, sits down and sketches
intergalactic pig-sties
to colonise the moon.

The idea of a child orbits inside me.
It’s the winter of 1963.
Neil Armstrong practises space-walking.

Unpublished endorsement:  There is an exhilaration in the sheer economy with which Eleanor Cooke achieves her effects, the language plain and down to earth but always quick with the pulse of lyric, the register contemporary but cut back to essentials so that the voices of William Blake, or of Saint Godric, the first lyric poet in English, can break through like suppressed energies. For all their playfulness, these are searching poems, rooted in the tradition but finely attuned to the absences and uncertainties in the culture.

Roger Garfitt

Unpublished endorsement:  These poems are about absence, about presence – poems that explore transgressive energies, sudden shifts of perception, qualified epiphanies – in language that is spontaneous, sparkling with energy and insight

Penelope Shuttle