home>
poets>
Jeremy Page biography
last update:
17 Sep21
poetry favourites:
Pindrop Press
HappenStance Press
Poetry Magazines
and in the shop…
collections –
“The Naming”
and
“The Alternative Version”
The Frogmore Press;
“Closing Time”
Pindrop Press;
bi-lingual –
“If Not Now”
Integral/CLP
(Bucharest);
pamphlet –
“In and Out of the Dark Wood”
HappenStance Press
anthology –
“The Silent Key”
The Frogmore Press
Jeremy Page was born in Folkestone in 1958. He has lived in France and Italy, and spent many years in London before moving to East Sussex. He now lives close to the South Downs in Lewes.
His poems have appeared frequently in magazines and anthologies and he has published five pamphlet collections, Bliss (Crabflower Pamphlets, 1989), Secret Dormitories (Crabflower Pamphlets, 1993), In and Out of The Dark Wood (HappenStance, 2010), Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography (Frogmore Press, 2016) and If Not Now/Dacă nu acum (Integral Contemporary Literature Press, 2017), and three full collections, The Alternative Version (Frogmore Press, 2001), Closing Time (Pindrop Press, 2014) and The Naming (Frogmore Press, 2021).
He has read at numerous venues including Lauderdale House (with Judith Kazantzis and John Weston), 106 Piccadilly (with Marita Over and Michael Swan), the Troubadour (with James Brockway and Myra Schneider), Folkestone Library (with Peter Reading), Shoreham Airport (with Michael Bartholomew-Biggs and Jackie Wills), the Dulwich Festival (with Hugo Williams and Helen Mort), the Chiddingly Festival (with John Agard, Grace Nichols and Catherine Smith), the Cheltenham Poetry Festival (with Anna Saunders), the Limerick Cuisle (with Fred Johnston) and the Cheltenham Poetry Festival (with Sharon Black, Mark Russell and Anna Saunders).
Comments on Closing Time (2014) include:
I like this book. It talks to me in conversational – sometimes quite confidential – tones about memories, relationships, bereavement and the small oddities of life. And as it shares its narratives, observations and speculations it does so deftly and economically, with wit and employing freshness of language. It does not bore me or exclude me by self-absorption. The (mostly quite short) poems say what they have to say, say it well and then move on.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, London Grip
Deftly juxtaposed with the touching detail and sound-patterns of ‘Shaving my Father’ are moments of understated humour and incongruity, even tragi-comedy: a Magrittian explosion, a grandmother watching wrestling on tv, his being mistaken for Elton John. An enticing evocation of seaside resorts in and out of season, and a clutch of unpredictable encounters, provide a wide range of pleasures – if with the threat of snowfall, and longing, never far away.
Stewart Conn
Page is unclassifiable, springing chameleon-like between identities. His poems are knowing, referential, but reliably rich in imagery, fun and emotion.
Wendy Klein, The North
This volume … rather triumphantly shores a great deal against ruin.
Joan McGavin, South
In this collection, the poet reconciles memory with the present, the past with the future. He interlocks and interweaves departures and arrivals, so it’s also apt (and no accident) that he should bring the book to an end with the following lines:
…and I see time future
contained in time past, and understand at last
why home is where we start from.
Closing Time might illustrate great pain, but it’s packed with life and is written by a poet who never falls back on facile devices to move us. I feel privileged to have had the chance to review it.
Matthew Stewart, Rogue Strands
His short stories have appeared in Ambit, Citizen 32, The Interpreter’s House and newleaf (Bremen). He has also written plays: Loving Psyche was performed in Bremen, Germany in 2010 and Verrall of the White Hart in Lewes in 2014. His versions of the Lesbia poems of Catullus were published as The Cost of All Desire by Ashley Press in 2011, and his novella, London Calling (2018), is available from Cultured Llama Publishing. Jane Bailey has described the novella as ‘richly comic and mischievous’, for Maggie Butt it ‘ought to be on prescription for 21st century blues’, and John O’Donoghue has commented: ‘Not since Paul Pennyfeather was sent down from Oxford has a disgraced student made me laugh so much.’
He has edited and co-edited several anthologies, including Frogmore Poetry (1989, with Antony Powell), Decade (1996, with Kate Pemberton), Poems from the Old Hill (2012) and Poetry South East 2020. In 2015 he co-edited an anthology of life writing, True Tales from the Old Hill, with Rachel Cole. Since 1983 he has been editor of The Frogmore Papers and since 2010 co-editor of the online journal morphrog.