Light that is both wave and particle

Maura Dooley’s poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her ‘sharp and forceful’ intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability ‘to enact and find images for complex feelings…Her poems have both great delicacy and an undeniable toughness…she manages to combine detailed domesticity with lyrical beauty, most perfectly in the metaphor of memory ’ (Literary Review). In her new collection, Light that is both wave and particle, those lyrical qualities and visionary sense have light as their focus. Light bends, spreads and travels on continuously and, depending on how we decide to look, both with it and at it, we see how it becomes local and particular. These are poems concerned with the way light falls on water, the natural world and our fraught place within it and, also, what might suddenly be illuminated by memory, history, the passage of time. Light that is both wave and particle is published on Maura Dooley's 70th birthday in tandem with Dancing at Oakmead Road: Selected Poems, her choice of poems from earlier collections, from Ivy Leaves & Arrows (1986) to Five Fifty-Five (2023).