Our Lady of Europe
Jeremy Hooker. London: Enitharmon Press/Dufour Editions,
1997.
Jere Odell
Jeremy Hooker's most recent book of poetry, Our Lady of Europe, sharpens his focus on the poetry of place. In such poetry the place becomes more important than the author and always more important than the poem that presents it. This is a learned humility and not the practiced failure it might seem to the poets of persona. Hooker's poetry is patient and quiet; steering away from the boast and bombast, it prefers the subtle image and the quiet effects of juxtaposition and collage.
Though Hooker's poetry may seem reticent to some, Our Lady of Europe is a refreshingly ambitious book; the places he has chosen as his subject threaten to overcome anything written about them. Each of the book's five sections is devoted to a different landscape: "A Troy of the North" to the Netherlands, where Hooker has lived, his wife's homeland; "Written in Clay" to the rest of continental Europe, especially the paintings, churches, and battlefields; "Crossways" to Palestine, mostly its holy places; "Motherland" to Greece, sometimes modern, always ancient; and "Imagining Wales" to Wales, especially through the visions of Waldo Williams and David Jones, who both begins and ends this book. The images of these places, their artifacts and their terrain, scarred or beautiful, fill the poems, instead of, as one might have expected from another poet, the ego's response to foreign stimuli. Sometimes Hooker uses landscape to uncover the deep connections between places, even across long distances and years; the shared histories behind a seemingly disparate Europe. This happens with the most drama in the middle section, "Crossways." Jerusalem, Jerricho, Bethlehem, and Tel Gezer are not Europe, but are an inescapable part of recent and ancient European history and culture. For example, here's the third section of "Tel Gezer," Hooker's poem exploring a much contested piece of territory:
From a deep cleft on the Tel,
a hawk flies out of the ground
and sheers off, circling, wind-ruffled.
Grassblades quiver under it.
And here the hawk has preyed since
before Pharaoh destroyed Gezer
and Solomon rebuilt it of mud
and stone, or the Assyrians
perfected the art of exile; since
long before the kibbutz formed
a small, green pool below,
in the dustbowl of stony hills.Tel Gezer: where the road
from Egypt to Syria
crosses the road from Jaffa
to Amman, with the Mediterranean
a long, bright sliver in the west.
Mount of Temptation for a people
with everything to lose,
and a people with nothing;
who look down on the valley of Aijalon
where the moon stood still,
and Latrun, the House of the Good Thief,
and over the hard hills of Judea
towards Emmaus on the road to Jerusalem.
Each name in this place is a sound
of approaching thunder-it would hollow
the skull with a blast of fire
to see what it means.Tel Gezer at the crossways:
destination of roads
from Warsaw and Buchenwald;
exodus of Arabs from Abu-Shusha
and El-Biryeh and El-Kubab,
on the road to refugee camps,
kicking up the dust of Palestine.
In addition to its poetics of place and its ambitious study of the embattled idea of Europe, Hooker's book pursues the myth of the Great Mother. Above the crossways and violences of all places, Hooker finds one or another version of Our Lady, sometimes it's a statue of the Virgin Mary, other times it's a Greek goddess, or an homage to David Jones's Queen of the Woods, or even Hooker's spouse, Mieke. We meet the Great Mother most readily in the poem "Verdun," where we also see the incongruities in the places the poems attend. Here's an image of violence rusting away in the rural vegetation:
On a bluff a machine-gun post,
an iron mask with two eye-holes,
looks down on new growth.Inside, the remains of a gun,
rusted and twisted.
The emptiness smells of fear.The mask that blinded
has survived the face. It overlooks
slopes with harebells and young pines.
And, a few sections later, here's an image of Our Lady, her chapel amid war-rubble:
EN MEMOIRE DE FLEURY DEVANT DOUAMONT
She is Our Lady of Europe,
her chapel stands on rubble
under pines, on blasted,
cratered ground.The woods are dark and still
where the village was,
but the chapel in a glade
is filled with sunlight.A white butterfly wanders in
and flutters outside the porch
as though it, too, were in the picture.
In this collage-styled poem Hooker presents two chapels (or two facts of the place) allied and at odds. One producing death, the other promising peace. Here, and elsewhere, his book gives the reader space to remember both.
Our Lady of Europe will find readers in England (and other places overseas) already familiar with Hooker's poetry; it deserves, as well, many good readers and writers of American poetry, who could learn from its neighborliness and honest love of places. For a poetry book of this quality, it's time to go abroad.