Missel-child / Helen Tookey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tookey, Helen, 1969- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--ukslc.

Literature.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

71 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Carcanet, 2014.

Summary:

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 syllables, 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

I

Then is it true 11

At Burscough, Lancashire 12

Prints 13

Estuarine 14

Shavuot 15

Cockleshells 16

Poem for Sabine 17

Magnolia 18

Among Alphabets 19

Fox-Seers 20

Autumn Child 21

II

Missel-Child 25

Unadopted 26

Funeral and Fox 27

At the Castle 28

Water, its Voicings 29

Katherine 30

In a Richer Mine 34

Shilling Visit 35

Cedar 36

Among the Gods (Persephone) 37

III

Male Nude / R.B. Kitaj Kitaj, R.B. 41

Mono 42

Portrait of a Young Woman 44

With Joe on Silver Street 45

Der Tod in Venedig 46

The Hardened Criminals of Tomorrow 47

When I was quite small I would sometimes dream 48

Miss Yamada Has Gotten Married 49

America 52

A long war, and now the returning 53

IV

Fosse Way 57

Hollow Meadows 58

Persephone in Adiyaman 63

Philadelphus 64

Rheidol Valley 65

Priest 66

Heron 67

In the dying days of the year we walked 68

Secret Name 69

Climbing the Hill at Sunset 70.

ISBN:

9781847772183

1847772188

OCLC:

862761117