Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese
Jeremy Over's poetry creates a world of delight and amazement; in the face of language, love and an elusive reality which seems eternally beyond the realm of rational control. His cornucopia spills out pineapples, watermelons, unstitched shoes and flocks of birds from the baked remains of the waterlogged family bible. He dares to glance down from vertiginous perspectives and the laughter his poems produce is bright and innocent. There is nothing reductive in his ironies. He draws on Neruda, Stevens, Traki and more, but readers will feel in his work the pressure of the Lorca of Poeta en Nueva York and the tonalities of Laforgue.
The poems rarely break entirely from a narrative core, yet they challenge the current orthodoxy of poetry as storytelling on every level. His is an important new voice and this is a glittering first collection.
The poems rarely break entirely from a narrative core, yet they challenge the current orthodoxy of poetry as storytelling on every level. His is an important new voice and this is a glittering first collection.
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.