Word and Stone

<p><em>Word and Stone</em> is questioning poetry which explores the ground between language that seeks meaning and the obduracy of matter and between life and what seems dead. Its concern is with a sense of the sacred and the possibility of renewing words such as ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ in a materialist culture. But it celebrates the material world too drawing upon nature and history in Hooker’s native Hampshire and his adoptive South Wales. It contains a number of elegies paying tribute to friends and to poets such as T. S. Eliot David Gascoyne and Christopher Middleton and the Americans James Schuyler and Charles Reznikoff. <em>Word and Stone</em> is concerned overall with ‘quickness’: how words may animate stone and intimate the life of the dead.</p>