The Rest of the World

'Geo-delirum' - as the title of one of the pieces puts it - is perhaps the guiding theme of this collection. Following on from Dreams of the Caucasus, Jope's prose poems occupy an interconnected - and increasingly digitalised - world in which traditional notions of the 'poetry of place' continue to be at stake. Evidence gained from virtual explorations - Google Street View in particular - informs much of the work, enabling the author to 'travel' to locations as diverse as Sicily (Corleone), Mississippi (Clarksdale) and Norway (Nordkapp) with no more than a series of mouse-clicks. By contrast, other pieces draw upon his first-hand experience of Hungary, Plymouth and elsewhere from his early years onwards as well as on his extensive reading and research. The world is envisaged as a treasure-trove of information that can be accessed, by all available means, in the pursuit of whatever knowledge a finite human life allows. Writing of Jope's work, David Pollard (Tears in the Fence #68) suggests that he 'is on a journey which has no ending, which searches for a topos never available except as poetry, as a book, perhaps an atlas'. Taken as a single enterprise, it poses the question of how much can be known of the world by anyone in the thirty thousand days or so which, at best, are likely to lie at their disposal - and the deeper, darker question of where all that knowledge goes when the individual who has acquired it loses their residence on earth. 'Before I die', he writes in the title piece of the collection, 'I will visit the rest of the world'... as if saying that somehow made it possible, at least for the duration of its saying. But perhaps in a sense it does.