Ancestral Lines
Published on 7. October 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-84861-508-3 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
114 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-508-3 (9781848615083)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941 and grew up in Warsash near Southampton, and the landscape of this region has remained an important source of inspiration. Many of his poems were written in Wales, where he has lived for long periods of his life. His academic career has taken him to universities in England, the Netherlands and the USA and he was Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan until he retired recently. As well as his twelve collections of poetry, including a recent Collected Poems from Enitharmon, Hooker is also well-known as a critic and has published selections of writings by Edward Thomas and Richard Jefferies, and studies on David Jones and John Cowper Powys, all of them important to his own creative life. Other critical titles include Writers in a Landscape and Imagining Wales, whilst Welsh Journal records his life in mid-West Wales during the 1970s. Shearsman Books has previously published two volumes of his journals, and in 2016 publishes his Diary of a Stroke together with his latest poetry collection.