Jeremy Hooker

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941 in Warsash, near Southampton, Hampshire ) is an English poet, critic, teacher, and broadcaster. He grew up on the edge of the New Forest village of Pennington, about two miles north of Lymington. After studying at the University of Southampton, Hooker lectured at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. First living in Aberystwyth, but then in 1969 moving to the nearby Welsh-speaking parish of Llangwyryfon. Hooker left Llangwyrfron around 1980, when he spent two years as a creative writing fellow at Winchester School of Art.

In 1984 he left the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Subsequently he lived for a while in Holland, teaching at the University of Groningen, before moving to Frome in 1989 and teaching creative writing at the Bath College of Higher Education. This later became Bath Spa University and he was the first director of its MA in Creative Writing. Jeremy Hooker spent the academic year 1994/5 teaching at Le Moine College in upstate New York. More recently he was a lecturer at the University of Glamorgan, from where he retired in 2008, becoming Emeritus Professor of the University.

He has published eleven full length collections of poetry (including selected and collected works), critical studies of John Cowper Powys and David Jones, as well as collections of literary essays. He has also edited works by Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, Frances Bellerby, Wilfred Owen. In addition Hooker has been involved with works for radio, including "A Map of David Jones".

When asked, in an interview, about influences Hooker listed Richard Jeffries, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and later David Jones, along with the American Objectivist poets William Carlos Williams and George Oppen. Hooker began reading Jefferies when he was twelve. Another important early influence was the fact that Hooker's father was a landscape painter, who had a great love of Constable.

The move to Wales in 1965 was important for Hooker's development both as poet and as critic, and during the 1970s he established himself as an important critic of Welsh writing in English (Anglo-Welsh literature) and was involved with teaching a course in Welsh writing in English, which had been created by Ned Thomas at Aberytwyth.

But the tension of being a "foreigner" in Wales led Hooker selling the house in Llangwyryfon, in 1980: "I owe no place more than Llangwyryfon, but it has taken eleven years of living there, in an agricultural and predominantly Welsh-speaking community, for us to realise that our particular kind of dislocation can't be mended by settling permanently where other people belong". While living there he published three books of poetry that deal with his earlier experience of life in Southern England: Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant(1974) (winner in 1974 of the Welsh Arts Council Literature Prize), Landscape of the Daylight Moon (1978), Solent Shore (1978), and a fourth collection that focussed more on his experience of living in Wales: Englishman's Road (1980).

A concern with place and landscape, in relation to personal identity, is central to both Hooker's poetry and to his critical writing, as is " the relation between poetry and the sacred".

Jeremy Hooker's collected poems The Cut of the Light. Poems 1965-2005 was published by Enitharmon in 2006, and in 2007 Moment of Earth: Poems and Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker, edited by Christopher Meredith, was published by Celtic Studies.