The Shadow Owner's Companion

Irish poet Eleanor Hooker's debut collection of poems is a rich, distinctive and sometimes unsettling book, full of warm presences, but also open to an otherness, at best glimpsed or half-heard but nonetheless real. "If childhood," as the poet herself puts it, "is a persistent whispering on the other side of the door, the poems in this collection attempt to hear that voice and to map out the landscape between the interior childhood world of terror and wonder and the exterior adult world of surreal reflections. An uncanny presence, represented by the Pike, swims freely through those spaces, linking both realms. The opening poem, Three Things, expresses a resolve, if not to reconcile the past to the present, then at least to safeguard them from themselves."