Ditch Vision 2017
Essays on Poetry, Nature, and Place
Published on 1. November 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
232 pages
978-1-906900-51-9 (ISBN)
Description
Ditch Vision is a book of essays on poetry, nature, and place that extends Jeremy Hooker’s thinking on subjects that, as a distinguished critic and poet, he has made his life’s work. The writers he considers include Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts, and Frances Bellerby. Through sensitive readings of these and other writers, he discusses differences between British and American writers concerned with nature and spirit of place. The book also includes essays in which he reflects upon the making of his own work as a lyric poet. Written throughout with a poet’s feeling for language, Ditch Vision is the work of an exploratory writer who seeks to understand the writings he discusses in depth, and to illuminate them for other readers. Hooker explores the ‘ground’ of poetic vision with reference to its historical and mythological contexts, and in this connection Ditch Vision constitutes also a spiritual quest.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
341 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-906900-51-9 (9781906900519)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jeremy Hooker grew up in Warsash near Southampton and at Pennington, on the edge of the New Forest, and the landscapes of this region have remained an important source of inspiration. Many of his poems were written in Wales, where he has lived for long periods. His academic career has taken him to universities in England, the Netherlands, and the USA. He is now Emeritus Professor of the University of South Wales. As well as for the eleven collections of poetry represented in The Cut of the Light (Enitharmon, 2006), Jeremy is well known as a critic and has published selections of writings by Edward Thomas and Richard Jefferies, and studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys, all of them important to his own creative life. Other critical works include Writers in a Landscape (University of Wales Press, 1996) and Imagining Wales (University of Wales Press, 2001); his features for BBC Radio 3 include A Map of David Jones. Jeremy's most recent books are Diary of a Stroke (Shearsman, 2016) and two new collection of poems, Scattered Light (Enitharmon, 2015) and Ancestral Lines (Shearsman, 2016). He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.