Overview

Since Welsh Journal (2001), I have periodically adopted a form of writing that juxtaposes prose and poetry. The Release is a work of this kind, in which diary entries and poems are combined and interact. Roughly speaking, the diary records experience that generates the poems, or, to use another metaphor, the poems disclose their roots in the prose. Between June 2019 and August 2020, I spent four long periods in hospital, initially in Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, and latterly in the Renal Unit at The Heath in Cardiff. The diary records my experience as a patient and reflects aspects of the life of the hospital; the poems respond to what I felt and saw in the ward, but also go beyond being a record of everyday reality. Like my Diary of a Stroke and other journals, The Release is a poet's journal. In ways that the book describes, the periods of hospitalization proved to be intensely creative. This was partly due to having so much time to write and read and think, together with the ever-present sense of mortality. Long days and some sleepless nights in bed were conducive to memory, and stimulated me to write, as well as the poems, rough drafts of two books: Addiction: a love story, and a memoir of my life in Wales. These are, as it were, backgrounds to the material of which The Release is composed. -Jeremy Hooker

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9781848617995

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Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941 and grew up in Warsash near Southampton, and the landscape of this region has remained an important source of inspiration. Many of his poems were written in Wales, where he has lived for long periods of his life, and now lives in retirement. His academic career has taken him to universities in England, the Netherlands and the USA and he was Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan before his retirement. As well as his many collections of poetry, including a Collected Poems from Enitharmon and a large Selected Poems 1965-2018 from Shearsman Books, Hooker is also well-known as a critic and has published selections of writings by Edward Thomas and Richard Jefferies, as well as studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys, all of them important to his own creative life.

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