Jeremy Hooker FRSL FLSW (born 1941 in Warsash, Hampshire) is an English poet, critic, teacher, and broadcaster. [1] Central to his work are a concern with the relationship between personal identity and place.
Hooker taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Bath College of Higher Education, Le Moyne College, New York State, and University of Glamorgan, from which he retired in 2008.
Hooker grew up on the edge of the New Forest village of Pennington, about two miles north of Lymington. [2] After studying at the University of Southampton, Hooker lectured at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. [3] First living in Aberystwyth, but then in 1969 moving to the nearby Welsh-speaking parish of Llangwyryfon. Hooker left Llangwyrfron around 1980, when he spent two years as a creative writing fellow at Winchester School of Art. [4]
In 1984 he left the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Subsequently, he lived for a while in the Netherlands, teaching at the University of Groningen, before moving to Frome in 1989 and teaching creative writing at the Bath College of Higher Education. This later became Bath Spa University and he was the first director of its MA in Creative Writing. Jeremy Hooker spent the academic year 1994/5 teaching at Le Moyne College in upstate New York. [5] More recently he was a professor at the University of Glamorgan, from where he retired in 2008, becoming Emeritus Professor of the University. [6]
Hooker remains active, and has continued to publish poetry and prose, including contributions to various periodicals, since retiring.
In 2013, Hooker was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. [7]
A concern with place and landscape, in relation to personal identity, is central to both Hooker's poetry and to his critical writing, as is "the relation between poetry and the sacred". [8]
He has published eleven full length collections of poetry (including selected and collected works), critical studies of John Cowper Powys and David Jones, as well as collections of literary essays. He has also edited works by Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, Frances Bellerby, Wilfred Owen. In addition Hooker has been involved with works for radio, including "A Map of David Jones". [9]
When asked, in an interview, about influences Hooker listed Richard Jeffries, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and later David Jones, along with the American Objectivist poets William Carlos Williams and George Oppen. [10] Hooker began reading Jefferies when he was twelve. [11] Another important early influence was the fact that Hooker's father was a landscape painter, who had a great love of Constable. [12]
The move to Wales in 1965 was important for Hooker's development both as poet and as critic, [13] and during the 1970s he established himself as an important critic of Welsh writing in English and was involved with teaching a course in this literature, which had been created by Ned Thomas at Aberytwyth. [14]
But the tension of being a "foreigner" in Wales led Hooker selling the house in Llangwyryfon, in 1980: "I owe no place more than Llangwyryfon, but it has taken eleven years of living there, in an agricultural and predominantly Welsh-speaking community, for us to realise that our particular kind of dislocation can't be mended by settling permanently where other people belong". [15] While living there he published three books of poetry that deal with his earlier experience of life in Southern England: Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant (1974) (winner in 1974 of the Welsh Arts Council Literature Prize), Landscape of the Daylight Moon (1978), Solent Shore (1978), and a fourth collection that focussed more on his experience of living in Wales: Englishman's Road (1980).
Philip Edward Thomas was a British writer of poetry and prose. He is sometimes considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He only started writing poetry at the age of 36, but by that time he had already been a prolific critic, biographer, nature writer and travel writer for two decades. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.
Alun Lewis was a Welsh poet. He is one of the best-known English-language war poets of the Second World War. His poetry centers around a "recurring obsession with the themes of isolation and death."
Welsh writing in English, is a term used to describe works written in the English language by Welsh writers.
John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography. His itinerant lectures were a success in England and in 1905–1930 in the United States, where he wrote many of his novels and had several first published. He moved to Dorset, England, in 1934 with a US partner, Phyllis Playter. In 1935 they moved to Corwen, Merionethshire, Wales, where he set two novels, and in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he died in 1963.
Vernon Phillips Watkins was a Welsh poet and translator. He was a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English".
Charles Hubert Sisson, CH, usually cited as C. H. Sisson, was a British writer, best known as a poet and translator.
Frances Bellerby was an English poet, novelist and short story writer. "Her poetry is imbued with a spiritual awareness encoded through the natural environment while her political socialism is more evident in her prose".
Christopher Meredith FLSW is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and translator from Tredegar, Wales.
Raymond Garlick was an Anglo-Welsh poet. He was also the first editor of The Anglo-Welsh Review, a lecturer, critic, and campaigner for the use of the Welsh language.
Robert Minhinnick is a Welsh poet, essayist, novelist and translator. He has won two Forward Prizes for Best Individual Poem and has received the Wales Book of the Year award a record three times.
Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group loosely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry".
Nigel Jenkins was an Anglo-Welsh poet. He was an editor, journalist, psychogeographer, broadcaster and writer of creative non-fiction, as well as being a lecturer at Swansea University and director of the creative writing programme there.
Richard Berengarten is an English poet. Having lived in Italy, Greece, the US and the former Yugoslavia, his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His poems explore historical and political material, inner worlds and their archetypal resonances, and relationships and everyday life. His work is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth of themes, and variety of forms. In the 1970s, he founded and ran the international Cambridge Poetry Festival. He has been an important presence in contemporary poetry for the past 40 years, and his work has been translated into more than 90 languages.
Owen Glendower: An Historical Novel by John Cowper Powys was first published in America in January 1941, and in the UK in February 1942. Powys returned to Britain from the USA in 1934, with his lover Phyllis Playter, living first in Dorchester, where he began work on his novel Maiden Castle. However, in July, 1935, they moved to the village of Corwen, Denbighshire, North Wales, historically part of Edeirnion or Edeyrnion, an ancient commote of medieval Wales that was once part of the Kingdom of Powys; it was at Corwen that he completed Maiden Castle (1936). This move to the land of his ancestors led Powys to write Owen Glendower the first of two historical novels set in this region of Wales; the other was Porius (1951). Owen, Powys's ninth novel, reflects "his increasing sense of what he thought of as his bardic heritage."
Wales was an English-language literary journal, published from 1937 to 1949 and from 1958 to 1960. The magazine contained fiction, poetry, reviews and articles pertaining to Wales.
Professor David Gwyn Williams, usually known simply as Gwyn Williams was a Welsh poet, novelist, translator and academic.
Martyn Crucefix is a British poet, translator and reviewer. Published predominantly by Enitharmon Press, his work ranges widely from vivid and tender lyrics to writing that pushes the boundaries of the extended narrative poem. His themes encompass questions of history and identity and – influenced by his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke – more recent work focuses on the transformations of imagination and momentary epiphanies. His new translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus was published by Enitharmon in the autumn of 2012. Most recent publication is The Time We Turned published by Shearsman Books in 2014.
Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages is a 1951 historical romance by John Cowper Powys. Set in the Dark Ages during a week of autumn 499 AD, this novel is, in part, a bildungsroman, with the adventures of the eponymous protagonist Porius, heir to the throne of Edeyrnion, in North Wales, at its centre. The novel draws from both Arthurian legend and Welsh history and mythology, with Myrddin (Merlin) as another major character. The invasion of Wales by the Saxons and the rise of the new religion of Christianity are central themes. Due to the demands of publishers and a paper shortage in Britain, Powys was forced to excise more than 500 pages from the 1951 version. It wasn't until 2007 that the full novel, as Powys intended his magnum opus to be, was published both in Britain and America.
Lucy Newlyn is a poet and academic. She is Emeritus Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, having retired as professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 2016.
John Davies is a Welsh poet whose first collection, The Strangers, was published in 1974. He was awarded the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize in 1985.