Led by the nose - Jenny Joseph

In this month-by-month memoir,
poet Jenny Joseph captures the smells and senses of her English garden. This
unconventional viewpoint is expressed through Joseph's sharp observations and
the sensual awareness in her poetry, combined with the energy of her
descriptive writing. Also reflected is a sense of humor that sends up those
in society who make one anxious about failing to live as the trendsetters
dictate. Full of delicious diversions that lead readers off the straight and
narrow path to smell the roses, this is a fascinating glimpse of a poet's
daily and eccentric life.
Not since Laurie Lee or Flora
Thompson has a writer captured the smells and moods of the English
countryside in the manner of Jenny Joseph's Led By The Nose. The nation's
favourite poet has tended her "rural slum" in the Cotswolds for decades and
her calendar of a year in her garden grows into an evocation of a personality
that is uniquely literary, often leading the reader off her garden path with
the sharply sly humour of her famous old woman who wears purple. Jenny
Joseph's memoir of a year in her garden through the sense of smell captures
the feel of each month, as well as the flow of the gardening year (the chores
to be done, the joy as your garden blossoms). The calendar of a year in her
garden displays a personality that is eccentrically loveable, a wilful
personality with her own individual outlook on life. The book's unfolding of
Jenny Joseph's personality is just one of its many delights. Jenny Joseph
focuses on the sense of smell, powerfully evoking memories and images that
only a writer of her originality and perception could capture in the full
range of thoughts and feelings a garden can stir in us. As one critic has
said of Jenny Joseph's work: "Her back garden, like Emily Dickinson's, has
room for most of what one can imagine about the world." Led By The Nose has
the unconventional viewpoint, sensual awareness and sharpness of observation
to make it a classic of English writing.