STONE HOURS

¶ Stone Hours is a medieval Book of Hours reimagined in the urbanscape. Although devised in London, the poems, like the crosses in the city’s kerbstones, stand for all that is urban. They are Rome, Paris, Dublin, New York, Toronto ... the “everycity” that extends beyond the local to the universal: “Where a green is / beginning will be the light having chosen / one stone world over another.”

• 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, bridges, towers ... Incredibly beautiful, marvellous, so accurate and unexpected, and at the same time simple. Deeply impressive. I salute it. ❧ John Berger

• Being a thoughtful person is a very special thing it seems to me. To think, to feel and then to tell of what we felt and thought, in poetic form, is truly the work of the poet. But to speak about silence, to speak of the fullness of emptiness and the beauties, the subtleties of stillness in the presence of power, this is rare. Jeremy Clarke does this, with humility and grace, a timeless watching and working into being human on Earth, a telling of that, a revealing for the rest of us who don’t have the words. He’s blessed, really. ❧ Emily Young

• Reading Jeremy Clarke’s poems is like watching something emerge out of the consciousness of the street. The language too feels its way along: precise, tenderly inventive. The place is littered with stray voices and brief psalms—beautiful, tiny adjustments to the progress of the book. It is, in effect, a religious process, with its prayers and psalms and hymns, a kind of liturgy for the permanent in the fleeting. ❧ George Szirtes

• The poems have an urgency: they are so spare, so concentrated; pared to an essential core, their reason for being; free of redundancy, ‘filler,’ time-wasting fuzziness. They have work to do, and are doing it with evident purpose, there on the page in front of every reader. ❧ Adam Clarke-Williams

• A work of beauty and genius. ❧ Tamasin Day-Lewis

• I can’t imagine many making such an offering with their life. A life that is a trail of depth and truth as shouldn’t be possible in this age. ❧ Michael Broughton

• When I reflect on big Biblical themes, I’m as likely to reach for a phrase or an image I remember from Stone Hours as I am from the great Book itself. ❧ Tom Adair

• He comes at the core of things simply and finds the mystery in them. The poems, read accumulatively, open to the reader like a gateway ... I so admire quiet line after line of his art. ❧ Jeremy Reed

¶ Jeremy Clarke lives in London.