Jeremy Page

I’ve always written both poetry and prose, I write to have the conversations with myself that I wouldn’t otherwise have. One way or another all the poetry and prose I have written has taught me something about myself I might otherwise never have known (and, in some cases, might have been better not knowing). When something I’ve written finds a readership it resonates with, this brings me immense satisfaction. It’s an indication that we might not, after all, each inhabit our own individual moral universe.

My work has appeared in magazines such as Aesthetica, Agenda, Ambit and Magma and in numerous anthologies. My first slim volume of poetry was Bliss, published in the Crabflower Pamphlets series in 1989. The first full collection The Alternative Version was published in 2001 and my second Closing Time in 2014. My poems have been translated into other languages and published in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Romania and the USA. I have translated the work of a number of European poets into English, including Leopardi, Jacques Réda, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Boris Vian, and my versions of the Lesbia poems of Catullus were published as The Cost of All Desire by Ashley Press in 2011. My short plays Loving Psyche and Verrall of the White Hart have been performed in Bremen (2010) and Lewes (2014) respectively, and my novella London Calling was published in 2018. 

My special interest is in what connects writers and places, and I was pleased to be able to explore my relationship with my home town in my 2016 poetry pamphlet Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography.  I’m fascinated by the notion that place can effectively be another character in a novel, or locate a poem in time as well as – or instead of – space. I’m particularly interested in places that don’t, at first glance, have any inherent interest or particular significance. If you look hard enough, they will have both.