Of Ochre and Ash - a short review by Susan Maxwell

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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.

A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."

Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author

Eleanor Hooker
Jul 14
1 min read

Pleased to read this brief reivew of my latest collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) by Maxwell.

"I have also been reading Eleanor Hooker’s Of Ochre and Ash. I find it easier to start reading a new poet than a new prose writer, I don’t know why, even though I often read poetry with a sense of having my eyes averted in case I don’t ‘get’ it. I had not read any of Hooker’s poetry before, and am particularly drawn to the way water and its associates illuminate—subtly, a gleam from a subdued light—many poems; one links a corpse to a curragh, “a lattice-work of hoops and stringers…once covered in animal hide”. I don’t know why I find it unexpected that a poet is also a member of a search and rescue team, as Hooker is for Lough Derg’s Lifeboat Station, but I do: unexpected and impressive. A bit like her poetry."

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