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About the Book
Simon Jenner’s third collection establishes him as an emerging major voice. Two For Joy locates itself specifically in the Greenwich and Brighton of psycho-geographers’ nightmares (he knows a few) into the jokily devastating that’s come to be expected of him. An even tauter political engagement goes with a countervaling seasonal adjustment not prominent before. At the heart of this collection lie two kinds of elegy: monologues – especially the Swinburne sequence dedicated to Peter Porter - and other assumptions. Then three elegaic sections: one on a living man, one on a dead, and another as requiescats for the real obituaries of friends Jenner has written of for the Guardian. The language is more crystalline yet resonant; this collection ranges over a wider period (2005-13), sharpens perspectives on new achievements and almost casually evinces what a multi-valent, exasperating poet he is. Again emblems of the 1960s counterculture of his childhood (so he was both there, and remembers it almost sober) haunt the absolutes confronting us today. Yet again Jenner contrives some escape; this collection also commemorates those who haven’t. Here Jenner’s brilliance inherits its own bitter chorus of farewells.
About the Author
Simon Jenner was born in Cuckfield, Sussex in 1959. Failing everything at school except art, he learnt to fly instead, though discovering poetry forestalled a career in airframes. Belatedly educated at Leeds, then Cambridge, his PhD topic was paradoxically ’Oxford Poetry of the 1940s’. There followed BBC Commissions between 1999 and 2003. His debut - two bi-lingual volumes in Germany following tours, in 1996 and ’97 - preceded his British debut collection, About Bloody Time, published by Waterloo Press in 2007, followed in 2011 by Wrong Evenings. Perdika launched his Pessoa at the Portuguese embassy in 2010 (his Propertius translations will follow), and Agenda Editions scheduled his volume on composers at Glyndebourne, for 2014. He received a South East Arts Bursary in 1999, Royal Literary Fund grants in 2003, 2006 and 2012. He has been Director of Survivors’ Poetry since 2003 and, from 2008-10, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, at the Universities of East London and Chichester.