Book description
The naturalist Gilbert White is at the heart of this collection.
Like him, Jeremy Over explores an ecology with meticulous acuity. His
poems are 'found in the field': the beauty and oddity of the language
of others is brought into sharp focus. Robert Herrick's 'sweet
disorder in the dress' is subjected to a series of disrobings; a
guidebook, instruction manual and catalogue become occasions to
celebrate the pleasures of language. Setting out from White's Natural
History of Selborne, Over embarks on a sequence of poems that, in
White's words, lend 'an helping hand towards the enlargement of the
boundaries' of natural history. A deep seam of Englishness - Stanley
Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Henry Purcell - runs parallel to an American
dimension, and further off in time and space are traces of Tristan
Tzara, Rumi and Wang Wei. The reasonable language with which we try to
contain the unreasonableness of things here trips, spins and flies
into new figurations.
'Jeremy Over is deeply preoccupied with language - its cadence, its
music, its embedded jokes... You need to read quietly without
preconception of what you think the poems should be doing. They are
deceptive wee creatures and will surprise you.' Helena Nelson, Ambit
Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He studied law at Leeds
University and now lives near Cockermouth in Cumbria, where he works as
a policy adviser for the Department for Work and Pensions. His poetry
was first published in New Poetries II (Carcanet, 1999). His first
collection was A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Carcanet, 2001). His
second collection, Deceiving Wild Creatures, was published in 2009.
