Overview

Unlike Jope’s previous two Shearsman collections, this one mixes prose-poetry with (free) verse. Writing in Ambit about Jope’s Dreams of the Caucasus, Donald Gardner wrote that his reach ‘is romantic and wide, not only geographically – from the Sahara to the Hungarian puszta and on to the Arctic Circle. As with much travel writing, there is a goal beyond the journey. These texts are an attempt to read nature for signs and they also represent a quest for the elemental in himself, a sort of spiritual geology’. These concerns remain central, with locations ranging as far afield as the American Rockies and the Aegean Sea and a blend of first-hand and virtual experience. One section focuses on visits to Italy, and the titular poem of the collection reflects this – prompted as it was by a visit to the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, where Keats lamented the ‘posthumous existence’ he felt himself confined to in a letter sent in November 1820 to Charles Armitage Brown. By contrast, the sequence ‘The Supreme Experiment’ depicts the imagined world of an early Christian anchorite in the Sinai Desert and is (perhaps) an exercise in ‘negative capability’. There’s also a continued engagement with music and film – most notably the New German Cinema of the 1970s, which remains central to Jope’s cultural land-scape along with the experimental music of that time and place. The political concerns of those traditions seem relevant, moreover, to the turbulent landscape of the UK in the late 2010s – some are directly responsive to the Brexit referendum and its tortuous aftermath, as befitting the author’s own sense of threatened European identity during that period. Perhaps it’s not just the author who might lead a ‘posthumous existence’ but also the poem, which is inevitably the product of a time and a place that has passed. The question of what might remain current is unanswerable, all the more so at the time of composition, but there is always the hope of a hospitable shore that these poems seek.

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9781837380190

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This is Norman Jope’s eighth full-length collection and his third from Shearsman, after Dreams of the Caucasus (2010) and The Rest of the World (2021). Three further collections have appeared from Waterloo Press, and one from Stride; he has also co-edited a Critical Companion to Richard Berengarten (2011; 2nd edn. Shearsman, 2016). A further collection, Gólyák és rétesek (Storks and Strudels), was published in Zoltán Tarscay’s Hungarian translation in 2018.

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