Norman Jope - Dreams of the Caucasus

Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins
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Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy… although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's dream — and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering rendition of that dream celebrates. For here are places both far and near, unknown and known… from the Sahara Desert to the Tamar Valley, from the doomed flatlands of Béla Tarr's Hungarian puszta to the equally-doomed shores of WG Sebald and Brian Eno's Dunwich.

This is not, therefore, a continuation of the 'poetry of place' but a poetry of location, attuned as much to the comparison of places in their global context as to the 'matter' of the places themselves. Moreover, it is influenced as much by contemporary developments in 'literary' travel writing as by the poetry scenes in which Jope has participated. By combining the expansiveness and flexibility of such writing with the concision and concentration associated with poetry, Jope not only offers a contemporary approach to geopoetics but a timely expansion of poetic possibilities.

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