T. S. Eliot's remark that the one biographical detail readers could require of a writer is where he grew up applies to Jeremy Hooker, whose recent collection of essays, Poetry of Place (1982), announces the essential concern of his work, while Solent Shore (1978) and Itchen Water (1982) orientate a reader toward his heartland: the south of England around Southampton Water and the New Forest.

Peter Jeremy Hooker was born at Warsash, in the county of Hampshire, to Aubrey Wastie and Ivy Mold Hooker. When his father's work as a horticultural advisory officer took him to Lymington, in 1948, Hooker came into contact with the forest paths that, with chalk downland, river banks, and shorelines, form his most nourishing poetic landscape. He has written of how "when I turn over in my mind the word `tree' or `mud' or `water' I find that it brings with it, sometimes as a shadow, sometimes...