Negative of a Group Photograph (2018)
AZITA GHAHREMAN
Translated by Maura Dooley and Elhum Shakerifar
Negative of a Group Photograph brings together three decades of poems by the leading Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman. Born in Mashhad in 1962 and based in Sweden since 2006, Ghahreman is the author of five highly acclaimed collections. Her poems are lyrical and intimate, addressing themes of loss, exile and female desire, as well as the changing face of her country. The poems are brought into English by Maura Dooley, working in collaboration with Elhum Shakerifar.
Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019 and awarded a PEN Translation Award.
'These poems are a wonderful mixture of the bodily, the earthy and the transcendent, the metaphysical; they have lyricism and a sense of elegy and a wonderful sense of defiance.' – Boyd Tonkin
The Silvering (2016)
MAURA DOOLEY
Looking in, looking out, looking through are the recurring perspectives offered by these poems. These are poems interested in shifting light and what it reveals, reflects or conceals and especially, perhaps, in what remains 'caught in the silvering’.
‘The Silvering, a book of reflective and deceptively simple verse, lyrically beautiful, sharp and observant.’ – Tracey Thorn, New Statesman
‘Mystery, memory, uncertainty are recurring motifs in these (mostly) brief lyrics that both relish our perceptions and doubt their staying power.’ – Beverley Bie Brahic, Times Literary Supplement
A Quire of Paper (2015)
MAURA DOOLEY
Maura Dooley was Poet-in-Residence at Jane Austen’s home in Chawton, Hampshire. The house, now a museum, is where Austen wrote most of her novels. These poems offer glimpses of Austen’s still potent presence in the modest house in which, at a tiny table, she wrote her greatest works.
The Jane Austen House Museum is open to the public. http://www.jane-austens-house-museum.org.uk/
‘There are thirteen poems in this pamphlet. I was greedy for more but what is here is more substantial than some whole collections.’ – Pam Thompson, London Grip
‘Dooley delicately evokes the spirit of the place and its inhabitants in poems which are amusing and tender in turn.’ – Sue Dymoke, The Friday Pamphlet