Description: Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur "A.C." Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK.
A self-made migrant, Jacobs was a wanderer through other lands and lived in search, as he puts it, of the "right language," which "exists somewhere / Like a country." His poems are attuned to linguistic and geographic otherness and to the lingering sense of exile that often persists in a diaspora. In his quiet and philosophical verse we recognise an individual's struggle for identity in a world shaped by migration, division and dislocation.Review Quotes: 'I like Jacobs' poetry immensely, and wonder how he crafted it without the usual forms poets find helpful when learning their art. Among the 'early poems' is one called 'Oy'. I love this one because it was crying out to be written, and only Jacobs had the chutzpah and wit to write it... a thoroughly moral, elegant poet.' Leah Fritz, Acumen