Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography is a collection of poems written over more than a quarter of a century, which seeks to explore how poetry can give expression to the deeper truths about the connexions between poet and place. The author left the coastal town where he had spent his formative years at the age of eighteen, but has since returned for frequent short visits and longer periods; the poems reflect his relationship with his hometown over the decades in which he ‘grew away from it’. They investigate and interrogate issues of memory, resonance and association, and this paper explores the creative tension between the poet’s intentions in the writing of individual poems and the cumulative effect of a collection constituting an informal ‘resubmission for the ordinary level examination in psychogeography’.
Jeremy Page
Jeremy Page is Interim Director of the Centre for Language Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the founding editor of the literary journal The Frogmore Papers, and his own poetry and prose are widely published. His most recent collections of poetry are Closing Time (Pindrop Press 2014) and Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography (Frogmore Press 2016). His novella London Calling 1981 will be published by Cultured Llama in 2018.
