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