Simon Jenner

Winstanley (2021)

£8.00

Dedicated to ‘The Diggers and their modern heirs’ and inspired by the figure of Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676), Simon Jenner’s extraordinary tour de force is a heady mixture of the musical, political and historical. This is radical writing in so many different ways, all grounded in a poetical strategy that constantly surprises with the intricacy of its language and thought. Acclaimed on its appearance in Long Poem Magazine and launched at the Barbican in 2018, it now appears in booklet form.

ISBN: 9781906742966 Category: Tags: ,

Praise and Poems

‘Of course, this is ‘difficult’ or ‘modern’ poetry. I believe, however, that the world will catch up with it. This is to let you have advance warning so that later on you will be able to say ‘I told you so’.  David Pollard

‘No elegy but a sonorous homage to English rural labour and radicalism, Simon Jenner’s Winstanley reads like cloudy cider held up to the sun – taste here the luminous swirling sediment of centuries of apple-sharp dissent.’   – Naomi Foyle

III

We are your immanence O God
we beseech you cleave your visioning
steel through us not o
reft more flesh but pulse
through your earth cleansed of the
enclosing bitterers of salt and property
souring the soil.

Male, female created perfect fruit summer
of themselves, drop with no latter fall, reap June
from September seed times after harvest
in tiny fingers, and small ale loosens
the lemon girdle of evening.

Sweat and dung’s leavened out tillage to the sky –
see ploughs streak cirrus to vanishing points
of blue corn. We harvest heaven’s grains and all, all
shale rise yeasted with themselves, to face the chill
and fire stubble of morning.

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