Missel-Child

by Helen Tookey

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.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Helen Tookey was born near Leicester in 1969. She studied philosophy and literature at university and has worked in academic publishing, as a university teacher, and as a freelance editor. Her short collection Telling the Fractures, a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward, was published by Axis Projects in 2008. Her verse was anthologised in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2013), is her first full collection.

Reviews

[Tasha Mellins-Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Missel-Child, but felt that I really needed to give it more focused attention than I could bring to bear on a busy train. The author's style is rather sparse and disjointed, which is a real departure from my usual reading choice. I'll definitely re-read individual poems from the anthology, but I'm not convinced I'd purchase this as a way of introducing anyone to poetry!

*Goodreads First Read Review*