Lands of Lost Content is Norman Jope’s third Waterloo collection and his eighth overall. Jope’s work is perhaps best known for its geographical focus – not necessarily on ʹplaceʹ in the classic Olsonian sense, but on places (both real and virtual) and the ways in which they relate to each other. In this collection, however, the journeys are as much through time as space, taking the reader to imaginary worlds as well as ones that are real. The title, of course, is taken from Housman’s lyric – but this is as deployed at the end of Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout, rather than in its original context.

Roeg is a strong presence in this collection, as are the transgressive musicians of the 1970s. Dreams of a more vivid life inhabit it, particularly from the idealistic ‘Space Age’ of Jope’s childhood, but the Bomb-induced nightmares of the 1980s feature just as strongly.

This is a collection that displays an insatiable curiosity about the world – near and far, present and past – and is a further staging-post on Jope’s distinctive poetic journey. He continues to be one of English poetry’s best- kept secrets, but this collection is primed to bring him out into the open as never before.

Norman  Jope  is  currently ʹrestingʹ after a career as an administrator at Plymouth Marjon University and elsewhere. Currently based in his home city of Plymouth, he makes frequent visits to Budapest where his partner, the artist Lynda Stevens, lives and works. His earlier Waterloo Press collections are The Book of Bells and Candles (2009) and Aphinar (2012); two further collections have appeared from Shearsman, Dreams of the Caucasus (2010) and The Rest of the World (2021) and one from Stride, For the Wedding-Guest (1997). Gólyák és rétesek (ʹStorks and Strudelsʹ), was published in Zoltán Tarscay’s Hungarian translation by FISz-Apokrif in 2018. He co-edited the anthology In the Presence of Sharks: New Poetry from Plymouth (Phlebas, 2006) and a Critical Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt, 2011 and Shearsman, 2016); he has also co-organised Plymouth Language Club since 2012.

The magnificent cover image for Lands of Lost Content is after the original by Lynda Stevens.