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Michael Dooley’s poems have appeared in Banshee, the Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, online at RTE Culture, and elsewhere. He has had work shortlisted for awards including the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, the Doolin Poetry Prize, The Patrick Kavanagh Award and The Strokestown International Poetry Competition. In 2023, he read at Listowel Writers’ Week and will be the Featured Poet in the summer edition of The Stinging Fly. In Spring We Turned to Water is his debut poetry collection.
Dooley gives the pastoral tradition back its teeth and claws, and gives us, with ecstatic, imaginative and intricate observation, poems of transformation and revelation
— Stephen Sexton
He broke horses when chasers
were in the paddock on slow wet afternoons —
broke the careful silence of a newly backed filly:
‘Treat the reins as if they were velvet.’
He broke fasts with dawn prayers
under cracked-ridge saddles
and paint-flakes held in cobweb —
murmurs of Leviticus.
He broke his nose in an alley
in Charleville in 1982
fighting a traveller
for five hundred pounds.
He broke himself
in fits of compunction,
sending what little he had to Africa,
or to a satellite Evangelical.
He broke the yellow
stained glass of the
back-door when he
was ‘put through it.’
He broke his skin,
leaning over
a shotgun,
in 1994.
He broke his wife.
Horses, in exhaustion,
horses.
We pulled the roof off of the milking parlour,
sheet by sheet, drew square cut nails like teeth —
thunder-snap and peeling crack on concrete,
bouncing big-eyed kittens from their bales.
It opened like a wound, the pit, though we’d picked,
when we should have not, its hardened line of steel.
Rafters steamed by wet-day cows, introduced again to light.
In their hue, the strange and awful tone of opened bone.
Cows cautioned their step into this roofless place,
saw strangeness of stars when Dad milked at dawn,
hungered and herded dog-less to the yard,
greedy for the winter silage opened in June.
So we watered fields, tore up river like a weed,
the vacuum tank a dung-chen prayer
for hedgehogs found curled into knots in the dust,
swallow chicks who stepped out into oblivion.
Prayers, too, in the milking quiet between us:
stories of men, of fodder and strain,
how the heat was walking them into parlours,
giving them answers to questions they’d never need again.
ISBN: 978-1-915877-01-7| Pages: 80 pages / Hardback | Year published: 2024
In Spring We Turned to Water is the first full-length collection of poetry from Michael Dooley. It brings together poems of intricate watchfulness and stunning revelation from the natural world. In parts memory and experience, parts lore and the dreamlike, these visually striking and distinctly sounded poems emerge from a liminal terrain tightly charged with folklores and heritages, water bodies, outsiders, and wild creatures.
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Doire is the Irish word for oak grove, translating into English as Derry.