I have no acquaintance at present among the gentlemen of the Navy.
I have no friend left now at Sunbury.

What you mention with regard to reclaimed toads
raises my curiosity.

                                   from 'The enlargement of the boundaries'

The naturalist Gilbert White is at the heart of this collection. Like him, Jeremy Over explores an ecology with meticulous acuity. His poems are 'found in the field': the beauty and oddity of the language of others is brought into sharp focus.

Robert Herrick's 'sweet disorder in the dress' is subjected to a series of disrobings; a guidebook, instruction manual and catalogue become occasions to celebrate the pleasures of language. Setting out from White's Natural History of Selborne, Over embarks on a sequence of poems that, in White's words, lend 'an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries' of natural history. A deep seam of Englishness - Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Henry Purcell - runs parallel to an American dimension, and further off in time and space are traces of Tristan Tzara, Rumi and Wang Wei. The reasonable language with which we try to contain the unreasonableness of things here trips, spins and flies into new figurations.


Cover photograph: Shouldering the imitation ox from 'Deceiving Wild Creatures' in Richard Kearton, Wild Nature's Ways (1909). Cover design by StephenRaw.com.

Contents


Epithalamium     
...and they lived happily until they died.    
Moustachioed
Museum for Myself    
A Theory of Grasp    
A New Kind of Kiss
Love is not a talent
Badly Charred    
Delight in      order    
Killer in the Rain    
A Common Pitfall    
Poetry should be made by all (i)    
The Lambent Itch of Innuendo    
Whip Tim Kelly
Last Gasp, At the    
The Waterfall Illusion    
The Negatives    
Tree/Bush    
Blue    
American Experimental Music    


*

Tring    
The enlargement of the boundaries    
Not but now and then     
The exhibition of the fishes    
Mingles with the forest    
I only know that
Cursu undoso    
My female moose corresponds    
of roads.    
Hard references   

*

Your Awful Voice    
Pastoral    
And some    
Poem beginning with a suggestion by Bengt Af Klintberg    
Being big
The Call of the Drum and the Slap of Glory    
Kabir says    
A Man in the Wings    
The Yellow Orioles are equals now    
Birthday Haibun    
Several Senryu    
The North Cumbrian Coast    
Noses and Feet    
Leaving me    
Poetry should be made by all (ii)
Pendolino