Maura Dooley's poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her `sharp and forceful' intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability `to enact and find images for complex feelings... Her poems have both great delicacy and an undeniable toughness...she manages to combine detailed domesticity with lyrical beauty, most perfectly in the metaphor of memory ' (Literary Review). In Kissing a Bone, her second book-length collection, Maura Dooley's focus has broadened. In a landscape stretching from Tranquillity Base to Crossmaglen, via the Northern Line and the Berlin Wall, memory and photography, love and death, are captured through the imperfect lens of history.