Ebook

Led By The Nose (Ebook)

A Garden of Smells

The unusual, remarkable memoir of a treasured British poet: Jenny Joseph, author of Warning: When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, presents a year in her garden - twelve months of musings, wisdom and scents

Jenny Joseph was no ordinary poet - and Led by the Nose is no ordinary memoir. Shaped around the smells of the English countryside, it is full of the wilful personality and the sly humour that characterised the purple-clad old woman in her icon poem 'Warning'. Joseph's eccentricities permeate each chapter as she flows through the gardening year with its chores and blossoms, frequently leading the reader off the garden path to stop, smell the roses, and ignore the world for a while.

Full of the sensual awareness of Jenny Joseph's poetry, Led by the Nose is a singular memoir: a work of delicious diversion and literary flair, horticultural anxieties and countercultural tendencies, providing a glimpse - or sniff - of the landscape of this treasured poet's life.

Publication date: 10/01/2012

£8.99

ISBN: 9780285640948

ISBN 10 / ASIN: B007EWK9SA

Imprint: Souvenir Press

Subject: Humour & Gift, Reference, Travel & Nature

Illustrated by: Yvonne Skargon

Reviews for Led By The Nose

'A gardening book for the literary-minded.'

Woman’s Hour Radio 4

'A treat for the sensual gardener.'

Alan Titchmarsh Daily Express

'Led by the Nose looks and feels like the perfect present for a favourite gardening aunt. Small and chunky, beautifully illustrated with darkly floral woodcuts by Yvonne Skargon, it charts the changing seasons in Jenny Joseph's "rural slum"'

Times Literary Supplement

'Combining the knowledge of a seasoned gardener with the writing power of a poet'

Mail on Sunday

'You may not think that you know the work of Jenny Joseph, but you do. She is the author of 'Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple' - once voted the nation's favourite poem and a worldwide bestseller. Now she has written this year's most unusual gardening book.'

The Times

'This little book, covering a year in her own garden, is much more than an account of what borders she dug and when she planted her sweet peas ... the poet's sensitivity comes through in the details ... for those who want to evoke similar Proustian memories'

Sunday Times

Jenny Joseph

Jenny Joseph was first published in the 1950s by John Lehmann. Her first published collection, The Unlooked-for Season, won her a Cholmondeley Award and her prose and verse narrative, Persephone, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1995 she was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship. In 2006 her poem 'Warning' was voted Britain's favourite modern poem. She had three grown-up children and lived in Gloucestershire. Jenny Joseph died in 2018, aged 85.