Selected Poems of Alun Lewis

Literature & Fiction

Hooker, Jeremy

Lewis, Gweno

Poetry

HarperCollins, Publishers

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.

Imagining Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English

British & Irish

University of Wales Press

Imagining Wales

David Jones: An exploratory study of the writings

Enitharmon Press

This collection draws on what Donald Davie has discerned as Jeremy Hooker’s presiding territory: the emotion that we have when we recognise some particular terrain as home”.’ Davie suggests that it is hard to think of a better, a more humane or more timely end for poetry to aim at’. Written during his time as Creative Writing Fellow at Winchester School of Art, the collection takes the ancient capital of England, with its jumbled historical multiplicity, as a setting for a sequence which moves through self-discovery and the pain of broken marriage to a fulfilled delight at the processes of art - the anonymous painter of the title - and religious faith. Master of the Leaping Figures is a unified whole, a major work which justifies Dick Davis’s description of Jeremy Hooker as one of the best of our poets’.

Master of the Leaping Figures

Enitharmon Pr

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.

Ancestral Lines

Shearsman Books

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.

Diary of a Stroke

Essays & Correspondence

Selected Poems 1965-2018

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

The Release

In Welsh Journal Jeremy Hooker recalls his life in the seventies when he was an English lecturer (in both senses) at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth. Delighting in his closeness to nature, life in a cottage in rural Llangwyryfon is delineated in delicate, poetic prose: the passing seasons, work in the garden, walking the mountains, the birth of his two children. Yet though stimulated by the new surroundings, Hooker found himself isolated, unable to enter fully into the Welsh-speaking community, at odds with his position as an academic, haunted too by a longing for his Dorset homeland. As a writer he must grapple with depression and a failure of poetic nerve. Consolation is found in the companionship of fellow poets and critics, in the hard-crafted completion of a sequence of poems, in the rain-borne scent of the newly-turned earth.

Welsh Journal

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd

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