Description
Book SynopsisEdward Lear set out to administer mirth to thousands. Jeremy Over is an heir of the nonsense tradition, genially assaulting everything that "appears" to be fixed and serious. His poems celebrate surprise and synergy, discovering new forms of order in the riotous disorder of the world. Anarchic pleasures: he makes mischief, running words off their expected tracks until they come to rest in new postures, pleasures, meanings. The book opens in Lorca's New York and ends on the road to John Clare's Essex. Nostalgia for home, for a lost time and place shadow the collection, as does an undertone of grief, corrected by slapstick and sharp wit. The poems are restlessly acquisitive, gathering curiosities like old sideboards and closets crammed full of birds, beasts and fruit, and visited by an unlikely cast of walk-on characters, including Walt Whitman, Dante, Mata Hari and the Pope. "A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese" is a gallivant through an absurd, abundant world, reminding us of the pleasure and happiness to be drawn even from the most makeshift constructions and in the face of negative emotions.
Trade Review"It's good to lose something you don't really need every now and then; an item of clothing, some hair, a tooth, a piece of one's mind. A tree of course, knows this. Once we left the family bible out on the lawn overnight to soak up the late summer dew, and the next day we kneaded the bloated black pulp and put in the oven to bake And when the door opened... a cinema of black birds... from 'Divertimento'
