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Previous Publications
Simon Jenner Wrong Evenings (2011)
ISBN 978-1-906742-31-7
£10.00
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Guardian Reader’s Book of the Year, 2007
As with so much in this absorbing book, the title opens onto other, more painful and more puzzling perspectives. Touch and taste, history and healing, are thematic in Jenner’s poetry, which is ultimately about (im)mortality and bloody Time itself
James Keery, PN Review (193)
About Bloody Time is brilliant, full of tactical love of language, attractively drawn to events and arts as well as to the terrible obligations of pastoral and ethical. Best point is that page after page there are things I’m glad I’ve encountered and almost as frequently signs emerge which are new to me and happily met
Peter Porter (2009)
Rich and complex. For me there are essentially two kinds of ‘difficult poetry’—material I find worth engaging with…and that which I don’t. Jenner’s work is very clearly in the first category
Steve Spence, Stride
‘Xenakis’, for instance, is a classic — Andrew Duncan
There is genius in this poetry
Martin Seymour-Smith (1998)
Of course, this is ‘difficult’ or ‘modern’ poetry. I believe, however, that the world will catch up with it. This little review is to let you have advance warning so that later on you will be able to say ‘I told you so’ David Pollard, Tears in the Fence (51)
on Pessoa: A Vision
The poetry… is excellent. Jenner has an ability to draw the reader in at once… really, really worthwhile. Not being familiar with Jenner’s own work (though this is his work!) ‘writing as himself’, not as the fictive imagination of Pessoa, I feel compelled to finding more… Highly recommended Andrew Taylor, The Journal 29
It is its own inner-vision, and one that rewards re-reading… a highly distinctive, accomplished collection, light years away from the prosaic hinterlands of today’s mainstream Alan Morrison, the Recusant
Simon Jenner’s second collection bursts with the linguistic brilliance and intensely prismed spectrum of themes that made his first volume, About Bloody Time, so memorable and praised by writers as diverse as Peter Porter, Robert Nye, Andrew Duncan and Jeremy Reed. Jenner‘s latest work runs harrowingly clear of his brio, registering minute constellations of grief and throws of humour.
Wrong Evenings confirms Jenner’s late arrival to disturb the settled possession of things with his newer possession of urban dystopian, histories refracted by legend, arcane and contemporary culture clashing brilliantly. But also witness to suicide, social and personal breakdowns, family histories pulled out like mandrakes and outrageous literary impersonations. The already noted coruscating metaphors bite as one reviewer put it, like phantom nerves at his father’s absent leg. Behind tragedies lurk humour. Where everything is rightly as it shouldn’t be.
Born in Cuckfield in 1959, Simon Jenner was educated at Leeds, then Cambridge where his PhD was Dreaming Fires: Oxford Poetry of the 1940s. His debut volumes of poetry were two parallel English/German texts, From Head to Foot, and Player-Time. He won a South-East Arts Bursary in 1999, was recipient of two major Royal Literary Fund grants in 2003 and 2006 and BBC commissions between 1999 and 2003.
He has been Director of Survivors’ Poetry since 2003 and, from 2008-10, was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow: first, at the University of East London, then at Chichester University. His first volume for Waterloo Press was About Bloody Time. His latest volume Pessoa: A Vision (Perdika) was launched at the Portuguese Embassy in June 2010 while he was Poet in the City. This organisation also appointed him Writer in Residence at Hackney Council Archives in 2011.
He is currently writing a biography of 1890s poet Lionel Johnson. A third Waterloo volume is forthcoming in 2012.
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