Helen Tookey

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.

Missel-Child

Bryan Biggs

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. ‘Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLS This book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjørn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry’s oeuvre, to ‘remake the voyage’.

New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and 'In Ballast to the White Sea'

Remaking the Voyage

Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection City of Departures is Helen Tookey’s second Carcanet collection, following her 2014 Missel-Child, an ‘exceptional volume... from a powerful and intelligent imagination’ (Jeffrey Wainwright). City of Departures is a collection of uncanny spaces and fleeting encounters, an urban patchwork of glimpsed moments and chance affiliations. Through them, Tookey explores the ways in which we create meaning and connection in these kinds of spaces, and how the nature of those connections — often temporary and provisional — affects who we are, and who we are becoming. Tookey’s work has a new formal inventiveness and experimental temperament. The collection mixes prose and verse, and a multitude of voices and structures mingle on its pages. The poems connect through repeated images, themes and tones, which echo and re-echo. Their loci are neglected houses and gardens, canals, wrecked boats... liminal worlds where absence has a presence of its own, fertile ground for ghosts, fantasies, memories, and dreams.

City of Departures

'Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry's fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn't' - Michael Hofmann This book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909-57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry's 'lost' novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In a detailed introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and a writer deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjørn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with the pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. The introduction is followed by chapters in which renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry's work, including his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway and things Nordic, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry's oeuvre, to 'remake the voyage'.

New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and 'in Ballast to the White Sea'

Helen Tookey examines the work of Anaï¿½s Nin (1903-77)-- and the different versions of Nin herself, as woman, writer, and iconic figure--through the lens of cultural and historical contexts. She focuses particularly on questions of identity and femininity, exploring how the self, for Nin, is constructed through narratives and performances of various kinds, and shedding light on key issues and conflicts within feminist thinking since the 1970s, particularly questions of identity, femininity, and psychoanalysis.

Helen Tookey

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