Norman Jope – författare

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.

Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy ...although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's dream-and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering rendition of that dream celebrates. For here are places both far and near, unknown and known ...from the Sahara Desert to the Tamar Valley, from the doomed flatlands of Bla Tarr's Hungarian puszta to the equally-doomed shores of WG Sebald and Brian Eno's Dunwich.

This book, which accompanies the volumes published in the author's Selected Writings series, guides readers through the many-faceted poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns). Berengarten has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty years - not only as poet but also as translator, critic and driving force behind the legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival - and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. With thirty-four contributors from over a dozen nationalities, the book is a testimony to the recognition of his poetry by fellow writers and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries and frontiers. The range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's oeuvre responds enables him to put down 'multiple roots' in a number of literary traditions, and this is reflected in the book's diversity. It sets out not only to be of use to readers and scholars already acquainted with Berengarten's poetry, but as a guide to those who are encountering his work for the first time.It is divided into three main sections, the first of which approaches the work thematically and the second chronologically, while the third focuses on his 'Balkan trilogy' (The Blue Butterfly, In A Time Of Drought and Under Balkan Light).The book also contains an appendix of essays on Berengarten's ancillary roles as literary activist, EFL teacher/entrepreneur and teacher of poetry to children, as well as a detailed bibliography.

'Geo-delirum' - as the title of one of the pieces puts it - is perhaps the guiding theme of this collection. Following on from Dreams of the Caucasus, Jope's prose poems occupy an interconnected - and increasingly digitalised - world in which traditional notions of the 'poetry of place' continue to be at stake. Evidence gained from virtual explorations - Google Street View in particular - informs much of the work, enabling the author to 'travel' to locations as diverse as Sicily (Corleone), Mississippi (Clarksdale) and Norway (Nordkapp) with no more than a series of mouse-clicks. By contrast, other pieces draw upon his first-hand experience of Hungary, Plymouth and elsewhere from his early years onwards as well as on his extensive reading and research. The world is envisaged as a treasure-trove of information that can be accessed, by all available means, in the pursuit of whatever knowledge a finite human life allows.Writing of Jope's work, David Pollard (Tears in the Fence #68) suggests that he 'is on a journey which has no ending, which searches for a topos never available except as poetry, as a book, perhaps an atlas'. Taken as a single enterprise, it poses the question of how much can be known of the world by anyone in the thirty thousand days or so which, at best, are likely to lie at their disposal - and the deeper, darker question of where all that knowledge goes when the individual who has acquired it loses their residence on earth.'Before I die', he writes in the title piece of the collection, 'I will visit the rest of the world'... as if saying that somehow made it possible, at least for the duration of its saying. But perhaps in a sense it does.