This review is taken from PN Review 111, Volume 23 Number 1, September - October 1996.
on Jeremy Hooker, Lee Grandjean and Clive Wilmer
Jeremy Hooker, Lee Grandjean, Their Silence a Language
John Ennis, Heinrich Heine, Salvador Espriu, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Bland, Carole Satyamurti, Andrew Motion, Michael Longley, David Scott, Michael Longley, John Riley, Mark Strand, Denise Riley, John Montague, Clive Wilmer, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Abbs, George MacBeth, W.S. Graham, Francis Ponge, Douglas Clark, David Gascoyne, Christine Evans, Derek Mahon, Frederick Seidel, Geoff Page, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hofmann, Ruth Bidgood, Kirkpatrick Dobie, Vicki Raymond, David Malouf, E.J. Scovell, Jean Garrigue, Fleur Adcock, Kenneth Koch, Bernard O'Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, James Schuyler, Lee Harwood, David Wright, Vivian Smith, Kathleen Raine, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Michael Hamburger, Mark O'Connor, Les A. Murray, Charles Johnston, Fleur Adcock, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Michael Riviere, Lawrence Lerner, Thomas Blackburn, D.M. Thomas, Fleur Adcock, John Montague, P.J. Kavanagh, David Holbrook, John Silkin, Günter Grass, Elizabeth Jennings, Patricia Beer, Peter Sansom, Jaan Kaplinski, Vladimir Khodasevich, Jack Clemo, Frank Koenegracht, Jamie McKendrick, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Bleakney, William Plomer, Colette Bryce, Kathleen Jamie, Selected Poems
JEREMY HOOKER & LEE GRANDJEAN, Their Silence a Language (Enitharmon) £8.95
CLIVE WILMER, Selected Poems (Carcanet) £8.95
This moment from 'Steps', a haiku sequence, the first poem of twenty four in Their Silence a Language, suggests the collection's many creative journeys. The 'place' of the poem is at one level the New Forest, already announced in prose -embedded in a texture of interspersed jottings, sense-impressions, reflections on the history, ecology, etymological 'grounding' of the area - and by a photograph of one of Lee Grandjean's sculptures; at another level it is the place on the page that the reader is invited to explore, retracing the rhythms of Hooker and Grandjean in their own walking, observations and contemplation. It invites then a complicated act of collaboration, felt not only in the world of wood as subject, texture, source of metaphorical connections, but also in the mode of address: 'you' here embraces poet (as sculptor), sculptor, and reader (as sculptor): all part of the 'shaping' that is central to the deliberately 'opened' process revealed in the book. Hooker unveils his hopes for the reader, in a concluding critical essay, 'At the Edge', to 'half-create' and to discover through 'participating imagination' a work analogous to a wood 'in which mystery is integral to its being, and which therefore cannot be exhausted.' In practice 'Steps' is hedged typographically by ...
CLIVE WILMER, Selected Poems (Carcanet) £8.95
You shape the image:
it is a bridge we cross over
to meet in the world.
This moment from 'Steps', a haiku sequence, the first poem of twenty four in Their Silence a Language, suggests the collection's many creative journeys. The 'place' of the poem is at one level the New Forest, already announced in prose -embedded in a texture of interspersed jottings, sense-impressions, reflections on the history, ecology, etymological 'grounding' of the area - and by a photograph of one of Lee Grandjean's sculptures; at another level it is the place on the page that the reader is invited to explore, retracing the rhythms of Hooker and Grandjean in their own walking, observations and contemplation. It invites then a complicated act of collaboration, felt not only in the world of wood as subject, texture, source of metaphorical connections, but also in the mode of address: 'you' here embraces poet (as sculptor), sculptor, and reader (as sculptor): all part of the 'shaping' that is central to the deliberately 'opened' process revealed in the book. Hooker unveils his hopes for the reader, in a concluding critical essay, 'At the Edge', to 'half-create' and to discover through 'participating imagination' a work analogous to a wood 'in which mystery is integral to its being, and which therefore cannot be exhausted.' In practice 'Steps' is hedged typographically by ...
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