According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a ‘missel-child’ is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, whereof many strange things are conceived. Helen Tookey’s first full collection of poems starts from the missel-child to explore archaeologies of identity, place and language. She is a formally inventive writer, using collage and syllabics, exploring elegy and myth. The poems in this book create a space in which language enables something to be said and also to be shown.
A propos de l’auteur
Helen Tookey lives in Liverpool, where she teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Missel-Child, was published by Carcanet in 2014; her other publications include Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity (Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Bryan Biggs, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool University Press).