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Missel-ChildHelen Tookey![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British, First Collections, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (80 pages) (Pub. Jan 2014) 9781847772183 £9.95 £8.96 eBook (Kindle) (Pub. Jan 2014) 9781847772923 £9.95 £8.96 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jan 2014) 9781847772916 £9.95 £8.96 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have, or are prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
Missel-Child
The lady of the moon is in travail, her white face waxen as the missel-fruit. The gravelled path gives way to broken angles, burials of water. Follow it. Creep into the hospice of the yew, its pale lying-place. Curl up there. Wait. According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a ‘missel-child’ is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, ‘whereof many strange things are conceived’. Helen Tookey’s first full collection of poems starts from the missel-child to explore archaeologies of identity, place and language. She is a formally inventive writer, using collage and syllabics, exploring elegy and myth. The poems in this book create a space in which language enables something to be said and also to be shown.
I Then is it true At Burscough, Lancashire Prints Estuarine Shavuot Cockleshells Poem for Sabine Magnolia Among Alphabets Fox-Seers Autumn Child II Missel-Child Unadopted Funeral and Fox At the Castle Water, its Voicings Katherine In a Richer Mine Shilling Visit Cedar Among the Gods (Persephone) III Male Nude by R.B. Kitaj Mono Portrait of a Young Woman With Joe on Silver Street Der Tod in Venedig The Hardened Criminals of Tomorrow When I was quite small I would sometimes dream Miss Yamada Has Gotten Married America A long war, and now the returning IV Fosse Way Hollow Meadows Persephone in Adiyaman Philadelphus Rheidol Valley Priest Heron In the dying days of the year we walked Secret Name Climbing the Hill at Sunset Notes
Awards won by Helen Tookey
Short-listed, 2019 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (City of Departures)
Short-listed, 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection (Missel-Child)
'Missel-Child is an exceptional volume. Some of the subject-matter is found, some comes from a powerful and intelligent imagination and from keen observation. All is embodied in a language that is sensuous and strong.'
Jeffrey Wainwright 'The diction is unexpected, apt and deeply satisfying, focusing the reader not only on the words chosen, but also on the ghosts and resonances of those that might have been there.' Carola Luther 'Her quiet, precise poems have a genuine eeriness. She has interests in both archaeology and psychology, but knows intuitively that they aren't separate -- that when we dig up the past it's our own roots we are looking at.' Grevel Lindop Praise for Helen Tookey 'Narratives describing strange, sometimes dreamlike, episodes from a female protagonist's childhood dominate the second section of Helen Tookey's four-part collection of poems and prose poems, City of Departures ... The narrative is clear and secretive at the same time: it prompts questions.' W. N. Herbert, The Poetry Review 'The poems are finely crafted and closely observed, describing somewhat unsettling, dream-like landscapes and places of memory, deserted streets in European cities, or taking artworks and objects as inspiration and points of departure... [The] rejection of borders is a fitting ending to a collection that challenges formal and aesthetic boundaries, and engages with a range of European artistic influences to offer a vision of 'belonging as not-belonging' in the face of certain and chaotic political times.' Sophie Baldock, The Manchester Review 'Reading this book can feel like sliding into that sunken world. Strange things float beneath its beautiful surfaces' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph 'The city in Tookey's City of Departures is full of the excitements of history and chance, and the chances taken to make a kind of radiant sense of the world, in all its breakings-down and might-have-beens, which is exactly what, time and again, these beautiful poems do.' Jacob Polley
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