The Rest of the World
Published on 5. November 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
92 pages
978-1-84861-789-6 (ISBN)
Description
'Geo-delirum' - as the title of one of the pieces puts it - is perhaps the guiding theme of this collection. Following on from Dreams of the Caucasus, Jope's prose poems occupy an interconnected - and increasingly digitalised - world in which traditional notions of the 'poetry of place' continue to be at stake. Evidence gained from virtual explorations - Google Street View in particular - informs much of the work, enabling the author to 'travel' to locations as diverse as Sicily (Corleone), Mississippi (Clarksdale) and Norway (Nordkapp) with no more than a series of mouse-clicks. By contrast, other pieces draw upon his first-hand experience of Hungary, Plymouth and elsewhere from his early years onwards as well as on his extensive reading and research. The world is envisaged as a treasure-trove of information that can be accessed, by all available means, in the pursuit of whatever knowledge a finite human life allows.
Writing of Jope's work, David Pollard (Tears in the Fence #68) suggests that he 'is on a journey which has no ending, which searches for a topos never available except as poetry, as a book, perhaps an atlas'. Taken as a single enterprise, it poses the question of how much can be known of the world by anyone in the thirty thousand days or so which, at best, are likely to lie at their disposal - and the deeper, darker question of where all that knowledge goes when the individual who has acquired it loses their residence on earth.
'Before I die', he writes in the title piece of the collection, 'I will visit the rest of the world'... as if saying that somehow made it possible, at least for the duration of its saying. But perhaps in a sense it does.
Writing of Jope's work, David Pollard (Tears in the Fence #68) suggests that he 'is on a journey which has no ending, which searches for a topos never available except as poetry, as a book, perhaps an atlas'. Taken as a single enterprise, it poses the question of how much can be known of the world by anyone in the thirty thousand days or so which, at best, are likely to lie at their disposal - and the deeper, darker question of where all that knowledge goes when the individual who has acquired it loses their residence on earth.
'Before I die', he writes in the title piece of the collection, 'I will visit the rest of the world'... as if saying that somehow made it possible, at least for the duration of its saying. But perhaps in a sense it does.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
148 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-789-6 (9781848617896)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Dreams of the Caucasus is Norman Jope's sixth full-length collection and his second from Shearsman, after Dreams of the Caucasus (2010). Two collections have appeared from Waterloo Press, The Book of Bells and Candles (2009) and Aphinar (2012), and one from Stride, For the Wedding-Guest (1997); he has also co-edited the anthology In the Presence of Sharks: New Poetry from Plymouth (Phlebas, 2006) and a Critical Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt, 2011 and Shearsman, 2016). Born in Plymouth, he works as an administrator at Plymouth Marjon University and has co-organised Plymouth Language Club's long-running live poetry reading series since 2012 (having been involved with it since its inception in 2000) along with fellow Shearsman author Steve Spence. He has also made frequent visits to Budapest where his partner, the artist Lynda Stevens, lives and works; his most recent full-length collection, Golyak es retesek ('Storks and Strudels'), was published in Zoltan Tarscay's Hungarian translation by FISz-Apokrif in 2018.