About Bloody Time
Publisher: Waterloo Press
Published: 2006
Copyright date: 2006
Description: ‘You are about music and history’, Gerald Fiebig, Jenner’s translator, once told him. After such pigeonholing, Jenner here makes his extraordinary British debut. It’s a volume remarkable for these obsessions and also, unsurprisingly, for love, loss and a view to a death. Jenner’s take on this, in the title poem, fixates on a missing tin leg, the only part made of sphere metal, never to decay.
It is also extraordinary for its torsion of language.   This quietly wilful ravaging of syntax might suggest some of the modernists Jenner has championed but, to their credit, they might say too many Cheshire Cats grin out and vanish in mysterious circumstances. Loves, loss, scabs and humour keep erupting. As Peter Porter says, he’s uncatagorizable. Highly praised before his death by Martin Seymour-Smith, he added: ‘This will annoy people.’