City of Departures

Tookey Helen

"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 reecho. 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.

About the Author

Helen Tookey was born near Leicester in 1969. She studied philosophy and literature at university and currently teaches Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her short collection "Telling the Fractures", a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward, was published by Axis Projects in 2008. Her verse was anthologised in "New Poetries V" (Carcanet, 2011) and in Best British Poetry 2013 and 2014 (Salt). Her debut full-length collection, "Missel-Child", was published by Carcanet in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection.

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