Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

A strong sense of history informs Jeremy Hooker’s poems as he writes about Wales, Palestine, Berlin, Verdun, and numerous other locations. He explores the historical and cultural forces which have pushed forward (or backward) Western civilisation, and sees in them a crisis which threatens to pull apart that structure. European man, according to Hooker, no longer relates to the natural world with any sense of wholeness or well-being:

Longing is the road they travel

Every one a stranger
searching or the lost home

It is not here, not there.

     What is particularly noticeable about Hooker’s poems is they they can describe the natural world with a careful and dignified clarity:

Autumn, and the greeny dark
river carries grass and leaves,
flowing slowly,
serpentine through meadows.

     And it is this ease with description, juxtaposed with lines which deal with death and destruction, which give cohesion to the book. The reader has the feeling of a world which, though beautiful, is scarred with man-made horrors:

Thistles, poppies, blue cranesbill
by a dusty road.
In front, under the cloud stack
of an August sky,
                             the chalk ridge

On a bluff a machine-gun post,
an iron mask with two eye-holes,
looks down on new growth.

     There is, in fact, one poem “Toward Arras” which effectively sums up what Hooker is aiming for, its mixture of description and history and literary reference bringing all his concerns together. It also indicates how strong many of the individual poems are. They can be read as part of a collection, but have their own qualities. I was impressed by the seriousness of Jeremy Hooker’s intentions and the skill with which he has realised those intentions.