Eleanor Hooker
Of Ochre and Ash.
Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2021. First edition. 9781910251904 95 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 5.5" x 8.5", is new.
""Of Ochre and Ash," Eleanor Hooker's third collection of poems, lends to her familiar themes of family, place and memory a trademark uncanny, even otherworldly atmosphere, in which the glimpsed, the intuited and the half-known provide a great deal of the interest. The desire to "see my home from the other side" is a constant, but so too is immersion in the moment and, indeed, the ever-present nearby "darkening lake".
"Eleanor Hooker''s voice guides her reader through large metaphoric visions and the consolations of ordinary life. This is a collection full of urgent, haunted poems with a subtle range of approach; they are many-faceted works, reflecting the fragmented strangeness of experience. We face wild gothic moments, whose counterweight is the familiar, calm or stormy, world of the lake she lives beside and the people whose life is shared with hers."