Background to the poem

In this poem we find ourselves being led, like the speaker, into a place of aimlessness, as the poet takes us from ‘British Rail/network charts’ to an unspecified ‘dull board game’ (a reference to Monopoly). The image of the compass is repeated throughout and suggests that the speaker is seeking direction. However, she seems more interested in the aesthetics of ‘a long feathered/arrow’ than the specifics of finding her way. Think about the ‘true North’ mentioned at the end of the first stanza. Does this imply she once had found her own truth?

The movement of the Underground trains is reflected in the rhythm of the poem, adding a jolting and unstable sensation. The speaker’s mental map of London seems to be based on Monopoly and she seems as unenthused about being ‘in the South’ as she did as a child playing the ‘dull’ board game. Her memory, like the train line, is circular and she moves from the present to the past, ‘back and forth, left to right, round and round’. Note the distinction she draws between being ‘isolated’ and ‘isolate’ in line twelve and the multiple meanings of ‘broke again’ in the penultimate line.

About Maura Dooley

Maura Dooley grew up in Bristol, though she was born in Truro and is of Irish descent. She is a freelance writer and a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London. She has published several collections of poetry, two of which have previously been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has worked as an arts administrator and has close connections with the Poetry Society and the Arvon Foundation.

Her poetry is often personal, dealing with memory, complex emotions, journeys and our experience of time. ‘Explaining Magnetism’ is the title poem of her first full-length collection,which was published in 1991. She described it as being ‘full of compass points: journeys into different parts of these islands and beyond. Into the past, into other people and into myself.’

Dooley often takes everyday images and uses them to dive under the surface to a subtle and seemingly collective version of reality.