Jeremy Hooker: A Poetry of Place(s)

In his essay, ‘Pure and Endless Light: Henry Vaughan in his Landscape’, the poet Jeremy Hooker, who died on Boxing Day 2025, aged eighty-four, says of the seventeenth-century poet that his landscapes are ‘where inner and outer world meet, and spirit informs matter’.¹ How equally true this was of Hooker’s own poetic journey: it is the defining thread that shines out from his earliest collection, The Elements (Christopher Davies, 1972), to the very last published, Preludes and With a Stranger’s Eyes (Shearsman 2025).

It is also what I associate, powerfully, with my friendship with Jeremy, or Jerry, as he was known to his family and friends. It began in the Usk Valley he knew so well: we were both attending the annual colloquium of the Vaughan Association, which meets every year in Brecon to discuss, further and honour the work of the Vaughan twins, Henry and Thomas. Jerry cut an imposing figure: he was a big man physically, still evident despite being hampered in later years by illness and the effects of a stroke he suffered in his fifties. And his face was arresting: craggy, square-jawed, bearded, with thick, snowy hair. His smile was generous and immediately invited his interlocutor in.

Then there was the burr. West Country immediately; I soon learnt Hampshire, specifically. Accents are part of a poet: the accent of their use of language poetically; the accent of their subject matter; and, in many memorable cases, the accents with which they both read and speak (which are not always necessarily the ...