Some words on In Spring We Turned to Water:

“These poems are fiercely crafted, exquisitely lyrical, examinations from the charged landscape of historical aftermath, where faith is at once proximate and elusive, and the tribulations of the tribe echo in the ‘muck and wet’ of folk memory. In this vigorous debut collection, Dooley freights his line with intensity and invention, images shoal effortlessly. It is poetry that leaves you with a more rinsed and limpid vision, more obeisant to the grain of mystery in things, and refreshed.” – Dean Browne

“As the earth takes into its strata fragments of pottery and the rinsed buckles of soldiers’ belts, so do these rich, spectral poems interweave mythic and historical pasts with intensely observed personal landscapes. These studies of soil and water, animals and agriculture, works and days, resist the bucolic, pretty ideal of the countryside; rather, they are insights into the fraught, wild realities of the rural landscape. Dooley gives the pastoral tradition back its teeth and claws, and gives us, with ecstatic, imaginative and intricate observation, poems of transformation and revelation.”     – Stephen Sexton

“It is difficult to believe that this is a first collection, so accomplished are the poems within. These exquisite pages beckon readers close, then closer, until we see hawthorn blossom and hedgehogs, until we meet the eye of the mink, until we, too, begin to hear the ‘snitch, snitch, snitch, / of cattle grazing in darkness’. This book is a wonder.”  – Doireann Ní Ghríofa

“Michael Dooley is a rare and tremendous talent. Like a magus, he conjures words from language where there seemingly are none. He swims deep within the sensory heart, surfacing each poem — as a lapidary stone — on the bridge to the instinctual self. The seduction of a wing; an eye turns in a tree. And something of the other world alights in ours. A jewel among poets. I have been waiting for this collection for years.” – Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

Available to purchase: 

https://www.doirepress.com/books/poetry/in-spring-we-turned-to-water