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"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.
Letterset by hand, crafted in the old style, these 8 poems sing of honeybees and intone the "trembling water of the lake". Eleanor's work is evocative as always, teeming with the profusion of nature and its gifts and the people who interact with these, in good ways and bad. Echoes of Yeats's "bee-loud glade" come to mind, not just because of the theme but for the texture of the language too.
But Eleanor's words focus on the feminine, weaving images like spells cast over the page, words to harness the energy of the natural world that most of us don't understand but that lead the poet "to wheedle with words".
The honeybee with all its associations - productivity, sweet honey, its sting, the drone reproducing only to die - is a charming metaphor for the many dichotomies of life as well as the greed that abounds in society, where the bee-elect is "trapped in the syrup of its own success".
A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."
Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author
"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.
Letterset by hand, crafted in the old style, these 8 poems sing of honeybees and intone the "trembling water of the lake". Eleanor's work is evocative as always, teeming with the profusion of nature and its gifts and the people who interact with these, in good ways and bad. Echoes of Yeats's "bee-loud glade" come to mind, not just because of the theme but for the texture of the language too.
But Eleanor's words focus on the feminine, weaving images like spells cast over the page, words to harness the energy of the natural world that most of us don't understand but that lead the poet "to wheedle with words".
The honeybee with all its associations - productivity, sweet honey, its sting, the drone reproducing only to die - is a charming metaphor for the many dichotomies of life as well as the greed that abounds in society, where the bee-elect is "trapped in the syrup of its own success".
A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."
Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author
OF OCHRE AND ASH
‘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.’
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
LEGION
"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.
Letterset by hand, crafted in the old style, these 8 poems sing of honeybees and intone the "trembling water of the lake". Eleanor's work is evocative as always, teeming with the profusion of nature and its gifts and the people who interact with these, in good ways and bad. Echoes of Yeats's "bee-loud glade" come to mind, not just because of the theme but for the texture of the language too.
THE SHADOW OWNER'S
COMPANION
“The achievements are certainly not orphans in this book; it is teeming with both major and minor poems of really notable excellence and quirky intelligence. Hooker has a brilliantly nurtured and culturally stretched imagination. The Shadow Owner’s Companion is a wonderful collection of poems, bringing both learned and elemental evidence to the printed page for the first time. This is very special work indeed.”
Thomas McCarthy – Poetry Ireland Review
WHERE MEMORY LIES
‘Accorded the Markievicz Award, Where Memory Lies is a series of poems and short plays about events that occurred during the Irish Civil War, over a hundred years ago. Using archive documents and records, Eleanor describes the fate of five women, each of them victims of violence.
Dr Stephen Rhatigan illustrated the texts with portraits of the five women. He has also made a number of drawings to accompany the work.
Fifty-five copies of the book are printed on handmade paper and bound by Philipp Janssen of Boekbinderij Phoenix. Three copies are bound in green half-parchment; ten copies in white half-parchment - the other copies are sewn with a dark green paper cover (handmade) by Richard de Bas.’
A TUG OF BLUE
“Uneasy with their own introspection, poems such as Weathering, Upended and Mirrored remind one of Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett in their logical nightmare-scapes. Throw in Edgar Allan Poe for good measure, as Eleanor Hooker has a similar taste for exquisite terror. Eleanor Hooker’s fervid imaginative powers have bestowed upon her fortunate readers vividly adventurous and challenging poems which demand to be read and read again”
Paddy Kehoe
RTÉ Books
©2021 Eleanor Hooker