Wandering Spirits of Exile by Monica Minott
Published 19th June 2025.
With a Stranger's Eyes is in two parts. The first, Dutch Girl is set mainly in the Netherlands, where Jeremy Hooker lived for four years with his wife, Mieke. The second, longer part records responses to history and landscapes primarily in South Wales where Hooker has lived since 2001.
It also celebrates a number of Welsh writers, such as David Jones, Idris Davies, and Waldo Williams. The spirit of the poetry reflects the Welsh tradition of praise poetry. It is, however, very much the work of an English poet who recognises that he will always be a stranger in Wales, as he was also in Holland.
Strangeness, in fact, is a phenomenon that he recognises as integral to our human condition, which may produce an 'art of seeing' below superficial vision of surfaces into perception of the sacred and the quickness of existence.
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