Jubilation

the long version

This book, a fourth collection since Charles Tomlinson's Collected Poems (1987), is about staying young while getting older, and about the continuities provided by family life and shared interests. The title is a pun on the Spanish word jubilacion, which means 'retirement'. There are many poems concerning travels, in Japan, Portugal, and Italy, and one expressly called 'Against Travel', a poem that signals the dialectic of the book, moving between roots and wandering, wandering and roots. Tomlinson's roots are in Gloucestershire, but in 'Weather Report' there is a sense of Britain as a whole.