Our Lady of Europe

by Hooker, Jeremy

• ISBN13: 9781900564151
• ISBN10: 1900564157
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-08-01
• Publisher: Enitharmon Press

Summary

This collection consists of poems set in continental Europe, Palestine and Wales. From Spitzbergen to Jerusalem, the poems render different places with physical immediacy, and reveal the historical and cultural forces that have gone to their making. The main unifying theme is the relation between European culture, with its history of violent destructiveness as well as creativity, and images of the Great Mother. It is an ambitious book of poems, which explores the roots of Western civilization and is informed by a sense of crisis in the relation between European ‘man’ and the natural world.

Author Biography

Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941 and is a poet, critic, teacher and broadcaster. His ten collections of poetry are represented by a substantial selection: The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965-2005 (Enitharmon, 2006). His other books include Writers in a Landscape, Imagining Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English, studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys, Welsh Journal and Upstate: A North American Journal. He has edited writings by Alun Lewis, Frances Bellerby, Richard Jefferies, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas. His features for BBC Radio 3 include A Map of David Jones and the poem for voices, Landscape of Childhood. Jeremy Hooker has taught in universities, in Wales, England, The Netherlands and the USA. He retired, as Professor of English, at the University of Glamorgan, in 2008.

Table of Contents

To Mieke	p. 11
Beginning again	p. 12
Lines for an ice-book	p. 13
Willem Barents' last voyage	p. 14
Nostalgia	p. 16
A Troy of the North	p. 17
Cloudscape	p. 19
A new love poem	p. 20
In praise of windmills	p. 21
Noordpolderzijl	p. 23
Still-life	p. 25
Ikons, autumn colours	p. 26
In the market	p. 27
Riposte to Michelangelo	p. 28
Starting early	p. 29
Westerbork	p. 30
Reigersbos	p. 33
In Drenthe	p. 34
Island cemetery	p. 36
Blinded	p. 38
After Rembrandt: Saul and David	p. 39
After Rembrandt: The Anatomical Lesson	p. 40
Vincent	p. 41
Rotterdam: Zadkine's De Verwoeste Stad	p. 43
Dreaming of Europe: a college	p. 44
Homage to Rene Character	p. 49
Fenrir	p. 51
On a portrait of Edith Sodergran as a child	p. 52
A Picture-stone for Tomas Transtromer	p. 53
Edvard Munch: The Sick Child	p. 55
Remembering Berlin	p. 56
Pictures of Bruges	p. 59
Verdun	p. 62
Towards Arras	p. 65
The Stones of Brittany	p. 66
Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound	p. 67
Two Figures from Catalonia	p. 68
Ode to Antonio Gaudi	p. 69
The Mother of Laussel	p. 71
Tel Gezer	p. 75
Jerusalem sketchbook	p. 82
Jericho	p. 85
Bethlehem	p. 87
Walking to Capernaum	p. 90
Homer Dictating	p. 95
Steadily the day burns	p. 97
Panagia Kara	p. 98
Palikare	p. 100
Europa	p. 102
Earth Song Cycle	p. 104
Guests of Silence	p. 115
Variations on a theme by Waldo Williams	p. 120
'That trees are men walking'	p. 130
Notes	p. 135
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