We are pleased to announce the publication of Notes on The Waste Land, a poem by Tim Dooley that takes its inspiration and shape from T. S. Eliot’s great work, assembling a modern ‘mosaic of fragments’ to illuminate the stasis and turbulence of the new twenties. The book is illustrated with paintings by Jock McFayden and includes an essay in conversation with Dooley’s poem from Chris McCabe.

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A century after T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, Tim Dooley’s Notes on The Waste Land assembles a new “mosaic of fragments” from a walk by the Thames, a stalled train ride to Margate, and an imagined voyage from locked-down London to the frozen North. With the same length and structure as The Waste Land, Dooley’s poem enters into a critical conversation with the original, delving into Eliot’s sources to illuminate the stasis and turbulence of a new era. At times playful and parodic, elsewhere arrestingly serious, Notes on The Waste Land continually surprises the reader.

 

Artist Jock McFayden’s luminous images of abandonment and Chris McCabe’s shrewd and entertaining commentary frame the poem adding ‘different voices’ to the conversation.

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Notes on The Waste Land will be launched on Tuesday 1st November 2022 at the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe, along with Tim Dooley’s other recent publication, In Winter Light the first translation into English of the Swiss French poet Philippe Jaccottet’s “Á la lumière d’hiver’ in its entirety. Poet Jane Draycott has said of the book: ‘Tim Dooley wonderfully combines the grace of his own attentive poetics with a clear intimacy of understanding. [He] relays Jaccottet’s lucidly charged journey through loss and mourning in language that’s as close to the ear as it is to the imagination and the heart.”

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Notes on the Waste Land is available to pre-order here and you can buy ‘In Winter Light’ now through the Two Rivers Press website here.