Jeremy Hooker

Jeremy Hooker FRSL FLSW (born 1941 in Warsash, Hampshire) is an English poet, critic, teacher, and broadcaster.

Central to his work are a concern with the relationship between personal identity and place.

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 and was involved with teaching a course in this literature, which had been created by Ned Thomas at Aberytwyth.

First living in Aberystwyth, but then in 1969 moving to the nearby Welsh-speaking parish of Llangwyryfon.

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).

Hooker left Llangwyrfron around 1980, when he spent two years as a creative writing fellow at Winchester School of Art.

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".

In 1984 he left the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Subsequently, he lived for a while in the Netherlands, 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 Moyne College in upstate New York.

Hooker taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Bath College of Higher Education, Le Moyne College, New York State, and University of Glamorgan, from which he retired in 2008.

Hooker 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.

More recently he was a professor at the University of Glamorgan, from where he retired in 2008, becoming Emeritus Professor of the University.

Hooker remains active, and has continued to publish poetry and prose, including contributions to various periodicals, since retiring.

In 2013, Hooker was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

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".

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.