ABOUT HIS WRITING
"A Spanish stonemason asks: when is a stone properly placed? And he answers his own question: when my impatience to once more readjust it has vanished. Jeremy Clarke writes like a Spanish stonemason; his poems are houses, towers, bridges..."
John Berger
"Jeremy Clarke's work, his world of words, shows such a light and sober touch; but there, alongside the everyday and familiar things, swim creatures of the deep and the dark. We see and hear things from a dream normality; a city, a country, of visions and rhythms, where the mundane transforms to the mythic, and the understated bears with grace the delicacy and strength of quotidian experience.”
Emily Young, sculptor
"Very moving… so acutely perceived.”
Jeremy Reed
“It is rare to find poetry that writes itself through the poet, and not the other way round. These are poems without pretension, without references to anything other than their subjects. They talk to us, as they are talking, in the absence of the poet. It is a strange, yet familiar experience; both individual and universal reflected by the fresh images in the poems.”
Abdulkareem Kasid
"No subject – however unlikely or fleeting – escapes his interest or compassion. His meticulous, melodious words illuminate something transcendental in the lowest of human circumstances.”
T. J. Adair
"A clarity of vision and tactility of imagery that matches Hopkins. Whatever he writes about – people, animals, things, places – it is as if he is seeing them from within. He doesn't impose his own expression, or even experience, upon them. The expression is of the thing in itself.”
Andrew Nicholson
"And I am here, in a place beyond desire or fear"... is a line from a poem by Jeremy Clarke, whose manuscripts can be seen framed on the walls of St Pancras Old Church and who one imagines as the hermit of this place. The fact is that he is a quiet, modest, youthful figure, currently unknown except to a small body of admirers (including John Berger and Ronald Blythe), who lives in a barely furnished eyrie a few minutes walk away... Poetry is his vocation, he says, not his profession. "I just want to keep myself focused on the truth and communicate it as honestly and as clearly as I can."
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Rupert Christiansen, The Daily Telegraph (4 October 2010)
"'I'm a perfect stranger / passing through the commonplace, amazed.' If there’s anything that I hope might happen through my writing, it is that people might walk through this world in that way, almost with a sense of awe, which certainly in an urban context gets lost. Partly because we’re inundated with so much wow factor technology, the lights, bells and whistles of the urban experience, we have to constantly make choices as to what to attend to and ignore. Attention spans get necessarily shorter. The small details of life begin to be dishonoured."
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Terence Handley MacMath, Church Times (11 March 2011)
"I have found dozens of Betjeman or Betjeman-related items on the shelves [of the secondhand bookshop Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road] and the pleasure is enhanced for me by a chat with the knowledgeable staff behind the counter - and the sight of their adorable and most bookish puppy. Described in The Daily Telegraph as 'the pious poet of St Pancras', [Jeremy Clarke] recently published Devon Hymns, his first volume of verse. I strongly recommend it to you and am not remotely surprised that, in January, he became poet-in-residence at Eton College and is admired by the likes of John Berger and Ronald Blythe. A brief quotation would not do the work justice but I have no doubt that Sir John would have loved it - and so will you. I suggest you buy it (cost £12) when you next visit the shop, or order from Rufus Books".
John Heald, The Betjeman Society Newsletter (No.81, April 2011)
