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Fur Coats in Tahiti

Jeremy Over

Cover of Fur Coats in Tahiti by Jeremy Over
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Categories: 21st Century, British, Humour
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (128 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2019)
9781784107635
£9.99 £8.99
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2019)
9781784107642
£7.99 £7.19
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the 2020 Wales Poetry Book of the Year

    Fur Coats in Tahiti
    is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group and the New York school. There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary. Elsewhere there are childlike, and plain childish, oral and aural pleasures to be had with bananas, cherries and Slobodan Živojinovic; tahini and Petroc Trelawny. The book begins with 'O', an openmouthed astonishment at nativity, and ends, not with Z but, in the hope of further connection, with the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet: '&'.
    Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He now lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II in 1999 and he has had three subsequent collections with Carcanet: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (2001), Deceiving ... read more
    Awards won by Jeremy Over Short-listed, 2020 The Wales Poetry Book of the Year (Fur Coats in Tahiti)
    'It is this nothing offered that makes Fur Coats in Tahiti such a rewarding read, because it leads to destinations unknown, a restless, constantly moving walk after not knowledge, but illumination, the unexpected relationship between word and word that opens a window to the world. It is, I realise as I write, a kind of Dada Zen book; what more can I say?'
    Billy Mills
    'They also seem magical. Like magic words, or Latin mass: more powerful for all its uncertainty.'
    Joe Darlington, Manchester Review of Books
     'Joyous panoplies of alphabets warble, blossom and assemble into word songs made simultaneously stately and playful here in Fur Coats in Tahiti. Folklore and plainsong play with Stein and then Whitman comes over, inviting so many alphabetic others to join in: Wordsworth via Jandl via Atkins via Ono via You makes something entirely new! Over's marvelous word worlds mesh and refresh all our delights in loving thinking musics of sound, sense and nonce. Slip on this luxurious garment of a book where the language weather is always perfect.'
    Lee Ann Brown
     'In Fur Coats in Tahiti, Jeremy Over exuberantly defies expectations. These poems rollick as they explore relationships between sound and sense, interweave the surreal and the mundane, and conduct whimsical, unpredictable journeys. The work teems with intelligence and delight.'
    Carrie Etter
    'I am in love with the new collection by Jeremy Over, building as it does on the work of his first two books with so much style and grace. The poems are in thrall to the magic of the image, exquisite timing and exuberant ambivalence. Which latter, for me, articulates exactly why dull certainties and conciliatory platitudes tend to sail over my head. Over's is a poetry of endless curiosity and intellectual generosity, inviting us to wander and wonder with the writer. The long poems and sequences capture a quality of musical improvisation, but the attention is pulled back, again and again, by unexpected lyrical detail; as if distraction (by beauty, by stupidity, by wonder) were the only true method. And it is.'
    Luke Kennard
    Praise for Jeremy Over 'What I love about Jeremy Over's amazing writing is that everything, and I mean everything, seems to be available for him to work with and shape into memorable, challenging, and ultimately very human narratives, abstractions, meetings and diversions. Nobody else writes like him.'
    Ian McMillan

    'A beautifully orchestrated hot-stepping set of riffs between the poet and the world ... Jeremy Over's Fourth and Walnut makes you want to stand up and read portions out to passersby, just for the sheer joy of what he brings to the speaking mind.'
    Sampurna Chattarji
    'Fourth and Walnut takes in minimalism, citation, erasure, drawing, linguistics and philosophy to create a book of gentle profundity and quiet magic. Under its spell, the question isn't why monk and mystic Thomas Merton and TV weatherman Tomasz Schafernaker appear in the same poem, but why they haven't before. Over discusses the rhinoceros as a symbol of surprise. After reading his poems, it would take more than a rhinoceros to surprise me, although I would be worried about the linoleum.'
    Tom Jenks
    'A restless experimenter and game-player with language'
    Ian McMillan, The Reader
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