A collection of extracts from the diary of an English university lecturer during his stay in Aberystwyth, 1969-1980, comprising delightful and sensual comments on rural life, an insight into his depression and a selection of 32 poems inspired by his experiences during this period.

Casgliad o ddyfyniadau o ddyddiadur darlithydd prifysgol Saesneg yn ystod ei arhosiad yn Aberystwyth, 1969-1980, yn cynnwys sylwadau hyfryd a synhwyrus am fywyd gwledig, cip ar ei iselder ysbryd a detholiad o dros 30 o gerddi a ysbrydolwyd gan ei brofiadau yn ystod y cyfnod hwn.

The English poet and critic Jeremy Hooker’s life has moved between England and Wales, to which he has recently returned. This present volume has been shaped from extracts of a journal kept daily during the period October 1969–December 1980 when he lived in the Cardiganshire countryside and taught, as I myself did, in the English department of the university at Aberystwyth.

The author has won many friends in Wales (some of whom have walking-on parts in the book) not only because of his personal qualities, but for his sympathetic yet never uncritical appreciation of Anglo-Welsh writing (and of Welsh literature through translation) from a perspective which is deeply English but non-metropolitan. All this might suggest a cosy relationship and a comfortable book. It is nothing of the kind.

His time in Llangwyryfon was marked by deep cyclical depressions for which he later found physiological explanations, but which were experienced as guilt and defeatism and inner struggle, all of which find raw expression in the journal. He lives as an internal émigré in the academic world – ‘at times I find myself almost loathing the word literature’ – and an outsider in the London-dominated English literary scene, which ignores him and is in turn despised.

But as when Coleridge in his dejection writes, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are’, and yet manages to recreate the beauty in words of great feeling, so Hooker’s vivid rendering of natural detail carries us far beyond depression and is one of the great joys of the book.

No-one who knows the man will be surprised that the book also reveals someone who takes literature very seriously indeed, relating his reading closely to his own life, whom the reading of particular passages and particular books can hurt or alternatively transfigure. There is a deep romanticism in his belief that real insight comes from levels below self-consciousness, but while this view draws him towards modernists such as David Jones and Yeats, their social attitudes dismay him and he reaches for the democratic spirit of George Eliot, Dickens and Ruskin. He seeks a sense of the numinous which does not mask a true perception of social reality in the countryside.

Ned Thomas

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.