Overview

Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out. ‘Advice to a Young Poet’ opens happily with the news that Rilke can be ignored. ‘Equinox in a Box’ records a day spent gazing upwards in a James Turrell skyspace while the mind remembers, dreams and wanders out of the box. Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight. The book ends with an erasure of an Edwardian book for children on the ‘art of seeing’, revealing alternative vistas by looking within, and teasing, the language. Beyond the whimsy, what the book seeks are the precise coordinates of heaven which Thomas Merton found in Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. The search is, we learn, a kaleidoscopic and playful process of collage, digression and invention. Or, as Over puts it – ‘You have to look away and then back a few minutes later to notice the colour changes.’

Full Product Details

9781800174603

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘What I love about Jeremy Over’s amazing writing is that everything, and I mean everything, seems to be available for him to work with and shape into memorable, challenging, and ultimately very human narratives, abstractions, meetings and diversions. Nobody else writes like him.’ — Ian McMillan ‘A beautifully orchestrated hot-stepping set of riffs between the poet and the world... Jeremy Over’s Fourth and Walnut makes you want to stand up and read portions out to passersby, just for the sheer joy of what he brings to the speaking mind.’ — Sampurna Chattarji ‘Fourth & Walnut takes in minimalism, citation, erasure, drawing, linguistics and philosophy to create a book of gentle profundity and quiet magic. Under its spell, the question isn’t why monk and mystic Thomas Merton and TV weatherman Tomasz Schafernaker appear in the same poem, but why they haven’t before. Over discusses the rhinoceros as a symbol of surprise. After reading his poems, it would take more than a rhinoceros to surprise me, although I would be worried about the linoleum.’ — Tom Jenks

Author Information

Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II. There followed three Carcanet collections: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese, Deceiving Wild Creatures and Fur Coats in Tahiti. He currently lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales.

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