Fur Coats in Tahiti
Fur Coats in Tahiti is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group, and the New York school. Jeremy Over mixes collage, doodles, erasures, findings, and mistranslations to create unlikely meetings between, amongst others, the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou and G.K. Chesterton, the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki and Tommy Cooper, Steve Reich and Dan Maskell. There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary. Elsewhere there are childlike, and plain childish, oral and aural pleasures to be had with bananas, cherries and Slobodan Zivojinovic; tahini and Petroc Trelawny. The book begins with 'O', an open-mouthed astonishment at nativity, and ends, not with Z but, in the hope of further connection, with the twenty seventh letter of the alphabet: '&'.
About the Author
Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He studied law at Leeds University and now lives near Cockermouth in Cumbria, where he works as a policy adviser for the Department for Work and Pensions. His poetry was first published in "New Poetries II" (Carcanet, 1999). His first collection was "A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese" (Carcanet, 2001). His second collection, "Deceiving Wild Creatures", was published in 2009.
