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    Missel-Child
    Missel-Child
    Missel-Child
    Ebook73 pages21 minutes

    Missel-Child

    By Helen Tookey

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Poetry
    Release dateJan 30, 2014
    ISBN9781847772916
    Missel-Child
    Author

    Helen Tookey

    Helen Tookey lives in Liverpool, where she teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Missel-Child, was published by Carcanet in 2014; her other publications include Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity (Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Bryan Biggs, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool University Press).

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      Book preview

      Missel-Child - Helen Tookey

      HELEN TOOKEY

      Missel-Child

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems previously appeared: Archipelago, Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt, 2013), The Bow-Wow Shop, Kaffeeklatsch, New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011), New Walk, The North, PN Review, Poetry Proper, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Reader, Stand. Some of the poems also appeared in the pamphlet Telling the Fractures (with photographs by Alan Ward; Axis Projects, 2008).

      Contents

      Title Page

      Acknowledgements

      Epigraph

      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

      About the Author

      Copyright

      By sitting upon a hill late in an evening, neere a Wood, in a few nights a fire drake will appeare; marke where it lighteth, and there you shall finde an Oake with Misletoe therein, at the Root whereof there is a Misell-child, whereof many strange things are conceived.

      Sir Hugh Plat, The Garden of Eden, 1653

      I

      Then is it true

      Aber weil Hiersein viel ist, und weil uns scheinbar

      alles das Hiesige braucht, dieses

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