Keeping Time: (Salt Modern Poets)

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.

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

About the Author :
Tim Dooley was born in 1951 and grew up in the West Country. He read English at Oxford and has a research MA in Victorian Poetry from the Open University. He has taught English and Film Studies, in schools and in Further Education, in London and Hertfordshire since 1974. He is reviews and features editor of Poetry London and has worked as a creative writing tutor for Arvon, Writers’ Inc and The Poetry School. He has reviewed poetry for the TLS and co-edited the little magazine Green Lines. 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. Along with Keeping Time, which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for Winter 2008, Imagined Rooms brings together the poems Tim Dooley wishes to keep from four decades of writing.

Review :
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. Tim Dooley has a wide-ranging literary mind ... but these poems are anything but `literary’ in effect – their anecdotes and settings, references and details are very much of the here-and-now … There is a keen political awareness at work in many pieces…several poems take on the implications of that sobering mantra of a now-historical era, `The personal is political’. But it is what has happened since ... in brief third-person narratives, in sketches of lives adrift and hopes under threat. It makes for a poetry of thoughtful unshowy resonance, that can also be very funny.