About Bloody Time

At last an extraordinary poetic talent so far limited to a reputation gained only by word of mouth, can claim the wider readership it deserves. The language here is powerful, subtle, dangerous; involving surprising links that reconsider the specific. This involves a playful seriousness – no oxymoron. Each word is often unexpected in its absolute rightness and certainty; once read, no other will do. Jenner plays a game with both words and reader and, although games are serious things whose rules you break at your peril, the secret is to get just this side of the fracture, to make the referee rise the whistle to his or her lips and then, to everyone’s consternation, score the goal.
Jenner composes fragments of experience or rather fragments experience. But only because each careful fragment points, while still remaining a fragment, to the whole. The architecture here has the confidence of ‘The severed finger refers back to the hand’. In this poetry there is the consummate taking of risks essential to poetry.

All this is embedded in an abundant reservoir of knowledge; of poetry of course and literature but art, history and music too - the poet is a lifelong music critic. But more basic than these; the desperate subtleties of mortality and the poetic observation of them. These are scattered liberally at the margins yet always at the core of what is being said. Influences so incorporated that they shimmer on the skin ‘The more I find my caveats antiphonal’