Waterloo Press - Simon Jenner

Simon Jenner

Simon Jenner was born in Cuckfield in 1959. Failing everything at school except art, he learnt to fly instead, where discovering poetry forestalled a career in airframes. To forestall the dole, he was belatedly educated at Leeds, then Cambridge where the quaint paradox of writing his PhD Dreaming Fires: Oxford Poetry of the 1940s was hardly lost on anyone who tried to read him.

Despite early recognition from poets and critics like Martin Seymour- Smith, Jenner's extraordinary debut has been a curiously protracted one. It came via obstinate recognition - and poetry tours - in Germany in 1996 and 1997, a South East Arts Bursary (1999) and Royal Literary Fund grants in 2003 and 2006. In 2001 he was commissioned to write a major poem by the BBC, and appeared on BBC Radio 1999-2003. He has been Director of Survivors' Poetry, from 2003.

About Bloody Time (2007)

ISBN 9-02731-32-8
Price £8.00

Voted one of the Guardian Reader Books of the Year, December 29th, 2007

Simon Jenner's originality, long hived away, has finally reached book form.

His high-impact yet elegiac language, metaphysical wit, and refusal to come off the tightrope between modernism and recognizable states like emotion, have made him, like some few of his contemporaries, very hard to categorize.

To read extracts please click here

His eschewing the suppression of conflicting states in his poetry has disturbing resonances, and unexpected comic epiphanies - like the funereal focus on his father's tin leg. Comedy becomes elegiac, tragedy a sad farce. But the sheer difference of his poetry is unforgettable.

'With almost breath-taking twists of language... Reading this work has made me re-consider 'the real of beauty' in Keats' phrase.'
David Pollard

There is genius in this poetry
Martin Seymour-Smith

'Schoenberg's System' is a concise, imaginative and completely true poem... In a thoroughly admirable way, this work is miles from the prevailing styles admired in this country at the moment... It's hard to guess which poets have been an influence... There's some very good poetry here
Peter Porter

Simon Jenner is a serious and witty writer. His work is difficult but rewards close attention... There may well be a considerable new poet on the horizon. In my opinion, his best work is yet to come.
Robert Nye

Stride review of Simon Jenner's book About Bloody Time
Simon Jenner's poetry is rich and complex but it's the kind of work which is usually worth persevering with even if you don't always pick up every reference or follow every tangential thought. His punning style often flits across a wealth of subject matter and is not always easily explicable in terms of obvious meaning, even where a narrative is being suggested. Yet there's a playfulness which makes his work enjoyable, as well as frequent forays into the dark side of things.

To read the review, Polymath Qualities by Steve Spence, please click here

Waterloo Samplers No. 1

ISBN 1-902-731-01-8
Price £3.00

A psychedelic Keats infused with Larkin's spirit of precision, and the humanistic bite of Keith Douglas. Words are at the mercy of his kinetic pen; they crouch on the page like primed springs, and he stretches them. Nouns mutate into adjectives; his metaphorical inventiveness has something futuristic about it.
Alan Morrison

To read extracts please click here

Player Time/Player-Zeit (1998)

ISBN 899774-50-5

There is genius in this poetry
Martin Seymour-Smith

Simon Jenner's debut parallel text collection, published in Augsburg, in 1998, excited great interest, and led to his being awarded a South East Arts Bursary in 1999, even though the collection wasn't British! Some of the poems here were what prompted Martin Seymour-Smith - a very different poet and critic - to encourage Jenner from 1983, till his death fifteen years later.