Kirjahaku

This volume deals with the 20th-century literature that is either Anglo-Welsh or that which relates to Wales. The argument of how writers "ground" themselves in their imagined Wales as a means of anchoring themselves against groundlessness in modern civilization, is also examined.

This new collection of essays explores such urgent concerns in late twentieth century poetry as national and personal identity, and the relationship of history and the present. Jeremy Hooker takes a variety of poets and poems and sets them against each other to produce illuminating insights into the condition of modern poetry as a whole. Hooker also adds his thoughts on the present practice of literary criticism and the philosophies which form it. Drawing on poets from the English, American and Anglo-Welsh traditions, Hooker's subjects include Eliot, Bunting, Hill, Oppen, Wainwright, John Matthias, Roland Mathias, Gillian Clarke, John Ormond, and John Tripp. Almost all of the essays have been written since the publication of Hooker's last book of general criticism, the much admired Poetry of Place (1982).Jeremy Hooker was born in Hampshire in 1941. He was a lecturer at University College, Aberystwyth, for nineteen years, and is the author of several volumes of poetry, included a selected, A View from the Source. He has recently begun teaching at the University of Glamorgan.

Openings is a sequel to Jeremy Hooker's earlier Welsh Journal and Upstate: A North American Journal, permitting us a peak over the shoulder of a fine English poet at work, and on the move.

Ancestral Lines is a sequence of poems about 'the river of desire' that flows through the lives of a family. In these poems Jeremy Hooker recalls his parents and grandparents, and an elusive great grandfather. He both honours the mystery of personal identity, and celebrates the oneness of life through the 'lines' of generations. The sequence conveys a strong sense of places in the south of England, but in a special sense: it is grounded upon experience of 'the places that live in people', places that are a 'medium of sharing'. A concern with both the gifts and limits of 'seeing' in the sequence takes its bearings from his father's landscape paintings. [...] The figures that appear in the poems are not ghosts; the poet evokes them as real, loved and loving people. According to his way of seeing, each integral being is only partially knowable, yet also flesh of his flesh.

Diary of a Stroke is a poet's journal with a difference. After suffering a stroke in July 1999, Jeremy Hooker kept a diary of his experience in hospital and of the subsequent period of recuperation at home, which ended with his return to work shortly after January 1, 2000. As in his other published journals, he observed the life around him, with notations of the living moment giving rise to reflection. Closeness to death gave his thinking about questions of ultimate meaning a special urgency. As time passed, he found the diary becoming a memoir of his early years. The past was coming back to him in 'scenes', which were 'quick with sensation and laden with memory'. As a consequence, he was able to write about people dear to him - especially his parents and brothers - who had played a formative part in his life. At the same time as he was learning to walk again, and describing his immediate Somerset environment, he was remembering and vividly describing growing up in rural southern England during and after the Second World War.

Word and Stone is questioning poetry, which explores the ground between language that seeks meaning, and the obduracy of matter, and between life and what seems dead. Its concern is with a sense of the sacred, and the possibility of renewing words such as 'spirit' and 'soul' in a materialist culture. But it celebrates the material world too, drawing upon nature and history in Hooker's native Hampshire and his adoptive South Wales. It contains a number of elegies, paying tribute to friends, and to poets such as T. S. Eliot, David Gascoyne, and Christopher Middleton, and the Americans James Schuyler and Charles Reznikoff. Word and Stone is concerned overall with 'quickness' how words may animate stone, and intimate the life of the dead.

This volume draws on over 50 years of poetry written by a poet who stands a little askew to the dominant modes in Britain: an Englishman in Wales, and an English poet with a decided admiration for the work of both George Oppen and David Jones, two very different Modernist exemplars, whose work often seems to be admired rather than engaged with in this archipelago. Jeremy Hooker is a literary explorer, and a poet with a powerful sense of place, whose joy in landscape and his surroundings shines through his body of work. In his own words: "I am a lyric poet who seeks to free himself from the limitations of a narrow subjectivity. [...] Openness is what I have sought in all my writings, poetry, journals, and literary criticism. It means writing with a sense of fluid self, of self as process rather than fixed identity, and in relation to a world that is constantly in process. It eschews definitive statements, and perfectly rounded forms, and is not end-stopped. I do not follow American open-field poetry in any doctrinaire way, and David Jones has been more important to me as a breaker of traditional forms than Charles Olson. My idea of openness carries some notion of organic form, but is more concerned with making and breaking of poetic images, in the hope of approaching an ever-elusive reality." What I have sought is to choose poems that can speak for themselves, however closely they may relate to the company they keep. I have excluded from this selection a number of my longer poems, which I felt would be ill represented by selection, although I stand by them as a whole."

'Art of seeing', as Jeremy Hooker exercises it in these essays written over some thirty years, consists of acts of attention to a range of poets and visual artists. Aiming above all to be 'a careful, attentive, reader', Hooker seeks to illuminate subjects that have been neglected or undervalued relative to mainstream fashions, such as the poetry of David Jones, George Oppen and Christopher Middleton, Welsh women poets, and neo-romantic painters such as Winifred Nicholson. His guiding principle, in the words of Coleridge, is to awaken 'the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom'. Landscape recurs as a theme of poets and artists with a passion for 'localism, clarity and care for particulars'. While Hooker's aim as a critic is to explore his subjects' art and their visions of reality, Art of Seeing, which also contains reflections on his own poetry, constitutes 'a chapter of aesthetic and spiritual autobiography'.

Since Welsh Journal (2001), I have periodically adopted a form of writing that juxtaposes prose and poetry. The Release is a work of this kind, in which diary entries and poems are combined and interact. Roughly speaking, the diary records experience that generates the poems, or, to use another metaphor, the poems disclose their roots in the prose. Between June 2019 and August 2020, I spent four long periods in hospital, initially in Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, and latterly in the Renal Unit at The Heath in Cardiff. The diary records my experience as a patient and reflects aspects of the life of the hospital; the poems respond to what I felt and saw in the ward, but also go beyond being a record of everyday reality. Like my Diary of a Stroke and other journals, The Release is a poet's journal. In ways that the book describes, the periods of hospitalization proved to be intensely creative. This was partly due to having so much time to write and read and think, together with the ever-present sense of mortality. Long days and some sleepless nights in bed were conducive to memory, and stimulated me to write, as well as the poems, rough drafts of two books: Addiction: a love story, and a memoir of my life in Wales. These are, as it were, backgrounds to the material of which The Release is composed. -Jeremy Hooker

'Addiction' is the story of a double struggle. It is about the effort of Jeremy Hooker and his wife, Mieke, to combat the alcoholism that eventually contributed to her death. Based largely on the poet's journal, it contains poems written as acts of survival. The book concludes with a sequence of elegiac poems.

Preludes are primarily autobiographical poems written in old age. Their principal 'ground' is the south of England, and especially the area between the New Forest and the Solent, where Jeremy Hooker was brought up. They are, therefore, 'poems of place', and direct or oblique expressions of the making of a poet. Some deal with raw experience, but the aim in all is what Hooker (after Henry Vaughan) calls 'quickness' - not a narrow 'self-expression', but the transpersonal reality of the livingness of being in place.

With a Stranger's Eyes is in two parts. The first, Dutch Girl is set mainly in the Netherlands, where Jeremy Hooker lived for four years with his wife, Mieke. The second, longer part records responses to history and landscapes primarily in South Wales where Hooker has lived since 2001. It also celebrates a number of Welsh writers, such as David Jones, Idris Davies, and Waldo Williams. The spirit of the poetry reflects the Welsh tradition of praise poetry. It is, however, very much the work of an English poet who recognises that he will always be a stranger in Wales, as he was also in Holland. Strangeness, in fact, is a phenomenon that he recognises as integral to our human condition, which may produce an 'art of seeing' below superficial vision of surfaces into perception of the sacred and the quickness of existence.

Jeremy Hooker's journal records his close friendship over more than 40 years with the sculptor and painter Lee Grandjean. They have collaborated together and made many excursions together, and shared times at Lee's Norfolk home. Their relationship continues to be a long conversation, in which each has learnt more about the other's art, and about their affinities as image-makers and seekers of new vision in an imaginatively impoverished time. "I have no record of the date when I first met Lee Grandjean but I remember the occasion well. It was towards the beginning of my period as creative writing fellow at Winchester School of Art and I had introduced myself to the students by giving a reading of my poetry. At the end of the reading, to my astonishment, a man in a white boiler suit stood up and clapped. Nervous on this occasion, my first thought was that this was intended as satire. It was, in fact, appreciation, and this was my first encounter with Lee Grandjean, who, at that time, held a sculpture fellowship at the School of Art. We talked after the reading and it wasn't long before he was showing me the sculpture he was at work on. Thus began a creative relationship that has been, and continues to be, immensely important to both of us." -Jeremy Hooker

"The Cut of the Light" draws extensively on Jeremy Hooker's poetry written over a period of forty years. It shows the development of a poetry concerned with nature and history and the spirit of place, and comprises both formal variety and the 'art of seeing' which relates Hooker to a vital tradition of British and American poetry. The book contains early, previously unpublished poems and some new versions of later work. It represents the best of a consistently exploratory poet whose work is celebrated for its power and delicacy.

Upstate is the journal of poet and lecturer Jeremy Hooker's time spent in North America during the academic year 1994-5. Like his earlier 'Welsh Journal' (Seren, 2001), which covered his first sojourn in Wales in the 1970s, the book muses on his time as an Englishman in a foreign land - albeit a land with which he feels deep ties, both personal and literary. As the author says in his introduction: "Keeping a journal is a means of seeing in the dark, and the dark always advances." ..."I have no interest in confession, although I am aware that my very selectivity - and every journal entry is a selection from countless possible impressions - is a form of self-revelation...The one thing a diarist must never do is perform for an audience, even if the audience is only himself or herself. At best, I have found my journal a means of escaping from self-consciousness, since it is not about the ego in isolation, but about relationships between the seer and the seen, between self and other. If it is about finding oneself, it is about finding oneself in the world, neither of which is separable from the other.It will be evident from the foregoing that I understand keeping a journal as analogous to writing poetry. It is not the same, but there are analogies. Each is about making a shape in words - a literary journal rarely consists of raw notations; its aim is to find the right word or image, to form the corresponding 'shape' for an impression or thought. In my case, too, the journal has sometimes served me as a 'quarry' of poetic materials, as well as a way of thinking about poetry." Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941 and is a poet, critic, teacher and broadcaster. The most recent of his elevel poetry collections was a Collected Poems, 'The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965-2005' (Enitharmon, 2006). He is Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan.

Here scattered light falls across landscapes and memories. These new poems are among Jeremy Hooker's finest, extending his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the 'sacred', and deepening his exploration of history embodied in landscape. This new collection contains a variety of short, 'light' poems, longer poems, and sequences such as 'Saltgrass Lane' and 'Hurst Castle' dig deeper into his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline.