Review:
Ditch Vision: Essays on Poetry, Nature and Place By Jeremy Hooker and
Under the Quarry Woods By Jeremy Hooker From Planet 232
Diana Wallace reviews
Ditch Vision: Essays on Poetry, Nature and Place By Jeremy Hooker
and
Under the Quarry Woods By Jeremy Hooker
Awen, £14.00
‘Ditch vision’ is Jeremy Hooker’s evocative phrase for a certain tradition of British (or, perhaps, more specifically ‘English’) nature writing. While American poets such as Gary Snyder have been drawn to the ‘naked Nature’ of the wilderness, the British writers Hooker feels an especial affinity with – Richard Jefferies, John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy – find ‘nature’s fullness by looking closely at a small area: parish or cow-pasture, ditch or hedge or city lot’. In Britain, where almost every landscape shows the marks of centuries of human working, this attention to the bounded or domesticated is the way into the wild. Even a ditch, Hooker reminds us, is ‘man-made’ but the minute observation of a writer like Jefferies can show us the vast and intricate hidden life within that ditch. Jefferies’ ‘ditch vision’, Hooker suggests, is ‘an art of seeing’, which ‘combines aestheticism with morality, natural observation with imagination (or ‘magic’), science with a mysticism.’ It is a concept that has gained some traction in eco-criticism, though not perhaps as much as it deserves.
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