Fourth and Walnut
Regular price
€18.50
A01=Jeremy Over
Absurd
Author_Jeremy Over
British
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
Death
Discovery
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Humour
Joyful
Life
Love
Poetry
Whimsy
Product details
- ISBN 9781800174603
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 27 Feb 2025
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Shortlisted for the Wales Poetry Book of the Year Award 2026
Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out.
'Advice to a Young Poet' opens happily with the news that Rilke can be ignored. 'Equinox in a Box' records a day spent gazing upwards in a James Turrell skyspace while the mind remembers, dreams and wanders out of the box.
Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight.
The book ends with an erasure of an Edwardian book for children on the 'art of seeing', revealing alternative vistas by looking within, and teasing, the language.
Beyond the whimsy, what the book seeks are the precise coordinates of heaven which Thomas Merton found in Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. The search is, we learn, a kaleidoscopic and playful process of collage, digression and invention. Or, as Over puts it -
'You have to look away
and then back a few minutes later
to notice the colour changes.'
Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out.
'Advice to a Young Poet' opens happily with the news that Rilke can be ignored. 'Equinox in a Box' records a day spent gazing upwards in a James Turrell skyspace while the mind remembers, dreams and wanders out of the box.
Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight.
The book ends with an erasure of an Edwardian book for children on the 'art of seeing', revealing alternative vistas by looking within, and teasing, the language.
Beyond the whimsy, what the book seeks are the precise coordinates of heaven which Thomas Merton found in Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. The search is, we learn, a kaleidoscopic and playful process of collage, digression and invention. Or, as Over puts it -
'You have to look away
and then back a few minutes later
to notice the colour changes.'
Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II. There followed three Carcanet collections: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese, Deceiving Wild Creatures and Fur Coats in Tahiti. He currently lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales.
