By Eleanor Hooker

The Shadow Owner’s Companion

Debut collection of poems by Co. Tipperary based poet

Description

Eleanor Hooker’s debut collection of poems is a rich and sometimes unsettling book, full of warm presences, but also open to an otherness, at best glimpsed or half-heard but nonetheless reall. If childhood might be called a persistent whispering on the other side of the door, the poems in this collection attempt to hear that voice, mapping out the landscape between the interior childhood world of terror and wonder and the exterior adult world of surreal reflections.

“The achievements are certainly not orphans in this book; it is teeming with both major and minor poems of really notable excellence and quirky intelligence. […] Hooker has a brilliantly nurtured and culturally stretched imagination. The Shadow Owner’s Companion is a wonderful collection of poems, bringing both learned and elemental evidence to the printed page for the first time. This is very special work indeed.”
—Thomas McCarthy, Poetry Ireland Review

“Eleanor Hooker’s debut collection, The Shadow Owner’s Companion, is haunted by childhood memories, and by the fears unleashed by imagination itself. Its poems grapple with the intensity of this material and with its revelatory potential.”
— Lucy Collins, The Stinging Fly


ISBN 9781906614546 Paperback
140 x 216 mm / 5.5″ x 8.5″
70 pp
Feb 2012

Additional information

Dimensions 216 × 140 mm

Product Detail

  • ISBN: : 9781906614546
  • Size: : 140 x 216 mm
  • Pages: : 70 pp
  • Published: : 2012

About The Author

Author

ELEANOR HOOKER was born in south Tipperary in 1963, and after many years living in the UK, now lives in North Tipperary. Her award-winning poems have been published in literary journals worldwide. She has two collections published by Dedalus Press, The Shadow Owner’s Companion (2012), shortlisted for the Strong/Shine award for Best First Collection, and A Tug of Blue (2016). Her third collection and two chapbooks Honey (Bonnefant Press) and traces (Salvage Press) are forthcoming in 2021. Her poetry has been published in translation, in Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish and Romanian literary journals. Her profile features on the Irish page of Poetry International. She has twice won the UK Poetry Society’s Member’s Poetry Competition. Her prose and short stories have been published in the Irish Times and literary journals in Ireland, the UK and US. Eleanor Hooker holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, an MA (Hons) from the University of Northumbria, and an BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University. She is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a helm and Press Officer at Lough Derg RNLI. Eleanor Hooker began her career as a nurse and a midwife. (See also www.eleanorhooker.com)