Preludes are primarily autobiographical poems written in old age. Their principal 'ground' southern England, and especially the area between the New Forest and the Solent. They are 'poems of place' concern the making of a poet.
Jeremy Hooker grew up in Warsash near Southampton and at Pennington, on the edge of the New Forest, and the landscapes of this region have remained an important source of inspiration. Many of his poems were written in Wales, where he has lived for long periods. His academic career has taken him to universities in England, the Netherlands, and the USA. He is now Emeritus Professor of the University of South Wales. As well as for the eleven collections of poetry represented in The Cut of the Light (Enitharmon, 2006), Jeremy is well known as a critic and has published selections of writings by Edward Thomas and Richard Jefferies, and studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys, all of them important to his own creative life. Other critical works include Writers in a Landscape (University of Wales Press, 1996) and Imagining Wales (University of Wales Press, 2001); his features for BBC Radio 3 include A Map of David Jones. Jeremy's most recent books are Diary of a Stroke (Shearsman, 2016) and two new collection of poems, Scattered Light (Enitharmon, 2015) and Ancestral Lines (Shearsman, 2016). He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
