Deceiving Wild Creatures
The naturalist Gilbert White is at the heart of this collection. Like him, Jeremy Over explores an ecology with meticulous acuity. His poems are "found in the field": the beauty and oddity of the language of others is brought into sharp focus.
Robert Herrick's 'sweet disorder in the dress' is subjected to a series of disrobings; a guidebook, instruction manual and catalogue become occasions to celebrate the pleasures of language. Setting out from White's Natural History of Selborne, Over embarks on a sequence of poems that, in White's words, lend "an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries" of natural history. A deep seam of Englishness – Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Henry Purcell – runs parallel to an American dimension, and further off in time and space are traces of Tristan Tzara, Rumi and Wang Wei. The reasonable language with which we try to contain the unreasonableness of things here trips, spins and flies into new figurations.
Robert Herrick's 'sweet disorder in the dress' is subjected to a series of disrobings; a guidebook, instruction manual and catalogue become occasions to celebrate the pleasures of language. Setting out from White's Natural History of Selborne, Over embarks on a sequence of poems that, in White's words, lend "an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries" of natural history. A deep seam of Englishness – Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Henry Purcell – runs parallel to an American dimension, and further off in time and space are traces of Tristan Tzara, Rumi and Wang Wei. The reasonable language with which we try to contain the unreasonableness of things here trips, spins and flies into new figurations.
About the author
Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He studied law at Leeds University and now lives near Cockermouth in Cumbria, where he works as a policy adviser for the Department for Work and Pensions. His poetry was first published in "New Poetries II" (Carcanet, 1999). His first collection was "A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese" (Carcanet, 2001). His second collection, "Deceiving Wild Creatures", was published in 2009.