Hooker, Jeremy
HOOKER, Jeremy
Nationality: British. Born: Warsash, Hampshire, 23 March 1941. Education: St. Peter's, Southbourne, 1954–59; University of Southampton, 1959–65, B.A. 1963, M.A. 1965. Family: Married 1) Susan Hope Gill in 1968 (divorced 1984), one son and one daughter;2) Mieke Davies in 1986. Career: Lecturer in English, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1965–84; Arts Council Creative Writing Fellow, Winchester School of Art, 1981–83; docent, Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen, Netherlands 1987–88. Since 1988 lecturer in English and creative studies, director, M.A. in creative writing, 1992, and professor, 1994, Bath College of Higher Education (now Bath Spa University College). Writer-in-residence, Kibbutz Gezer, Israel, 1985. Visiting professor, LeMoyne College, New York, 1994–95. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1969; Welsh Arts Council prize, 1975, and bursary, 1976. Address: Old School House, 7 Sunnyside, Frome, Somerset BA 11 1LD, England.
Publications
Poetry
The Elements. Llandybie, Dyfed, Christopher Davies, 1972.
Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant. London, Enitharmon Press, 1974.
Solent Shore: New Poems. Manchester, Carcanet, 1978.
Landscape of the Daylight Moon. London, Enitharmon Press, 1978.
Englishman's Road. Manchester, Carcanet, 1980.
A View from the Source: Selected Poems. Manchester, Carcanet, 1982.
Itchen Water. Winchester, Winchester School of Art Press, 1982.
Master of the Leaping Figures. Petersfield, Hampshire, Enitharmon Press, 1987.
Their Silence A Language, with Lee Grandjean. London, Enitharmon Press, 1994.
Our Lady of Europe. London, Enitharmon Press, 1997.
Groudnwork, with Lee Grandjean. Nottingham, Djanogly Art Gallery, 1998.
Other
John Cowper Powys. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1973.
David Jones: An Exploratory Study of the Writings. London, Enitharmon Press, 1975.
John Cowper Powys and David Jones: A Comparative Study. London, Enitharmon Press, 1979.
Poetry of Place: Essays and Reviews 1970–1981. Manchester, Carcanet, 1982.
The Presence of the Past: Essays on Modern British and American Poetry. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1987.
Writers in a Landscape. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1996.
Editor, with Gweno Lewis, Selected Poems of Alun Lewis. London, Allen and Unwin, 1981.
Editor, Selected Stories, by Frances Bellerby. London, Enitharmon Press, 1986.
*Critical Studies: By Donald Davie, in Poetry Nation 9 (Manchester), March 1979; by Dick Davis, in Agenda (London), winter-spring 1982; David Jones and Other Wonder Voyagers by Philip Pacey, Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1982; by Brian Hinton, in Poetry Wales 18 (Bridgend), 3, 1983; by Wynn Thomas, in Anglo-Welsh Review (Tenby), no. 74, 1983; "Giants in the Earth: Recent Myths for British Poets" by Avrom Fleishman, in ELH (Baltimore, Maryland), 51 (1), spring 1984; Reading Old Friends by John Matthias, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992.
Jeremy Hooker comments:
My poetry is influenced by a strong physical and historical sense of place, initially as I experienced it in the south of England, where I was brought up, and as I learned to see it anew while living in Wales. I have subsequently written poems set in Wales, in continental Europe, and in Israel. I think of place as "ground," as the continuing creation of interacting natural and cultural forces, and as the meeting point of unique and common experience and of the living and the dead. I feel affinities with the Welsh tradition of praise poetry, especially as interpreted by David Jones, with his awareness of both the necessity and the difficulty of praise in a world that has largely lost a sense of the sacred. A literary and artistic tradition I particularly value is that of Wordsworth and John Constable, who said he found his art "under every hedge and in every lane," and of the American objectivists, who found their poetry in the streets of New York. Having begun as a poet of belonging, I have become increasingly concerned with strangeness and otherness and with exploring the possibility of new relationships between male and female elements of the psyche, nature and culture, and matter and spirit.
* * *Five of the eight poems by Jeremy Hooker in Introduction One (1969) include references to other poets—Hardy, Alun Lewis, Edward Thomas, and Dafydd ap Gwilym. It has always been clear that Hooker is a poet consciously rooting himself in traditions. He is acutely aware of the traditions of writing in the south of England, his birthplace, and his adopted home, Wales.
Hooker's commitment is to an exploration of structure—historical and metaphorical. His pamphlet The Elements includes the notable "Elegy for the Labouring Poor":
No man's lonelier than James Mould
As he wakes with stubble-scored legs
In a rat's refuge of wattle and daub …
But James Mould seeing the ocean
Sees only flint acres
Fought inch by inch, chalkdust rising,
And hears only his ghostly kin
Telling their names in the stunned brain.
This gives a clear indication of the method that Hooker was to employ in his subsequent collections: the power of imagination to inhabit another's mind over the centuries.
Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant is a sequence of thirty-eight short poems dealing with the significance in myth and history of the Cerne Abbas phallic man. The cumulative effect is impressive. Hooker uses the persona of the mysterious chalk figure to explore pre-Christian and Christian psyches while creating a credible being: "And beneath me /I feel the grass rise /And fall, like the slow, /Deep breaths of a giantess." The implicit danger of such an extended work is that the poet is eventually drawn into poetic exercises. Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant stops short of this, but Solent Shore is not as exciting, not as tightly controlled, as one would have wished from this talented poet. The book focuses on the poet's personal archetypes and can be seen as a natural sequel to the previous collection.
Too often the poems in Solent Shore rest on images that are competent but not exciting. The poet's aim is, to be fair, ambitious: to relate his life, the person he has become, to his background, the landscape and seascape of his heritage. The book's second section, "The Witnesses," is powerful. These related poems turn around the rich sixteenth-century history of the Solent Waters. This has the necessary force to hold the poet to the core of his theme: "The very last souls I seen /was that man's father /and that man's /Drowned like rattens, /drowned like rattens" ("Mary Rose, 1545").
Hooker is an accomplished writer and critic with a vision that can only intensify and come into a compelling focus: "Wires still buzz with messages /from the Titanic. /A seance breaks up /when a cabin-boy screams."