Jeremy Naydler has worked as a gardener for many years, serving his apprenticeship in York in the 1970s and subsequently working in various gardens in the leafy Victorian suburbs of north Oxford. The poems gathered together in this volume stem from his experience of gardening as a labour that 'seems ever to bend itself back toward soul'. For him, all gardening is soul work, and these poems live at the interface of soul and garden, where inner experience finds itself reflected in outer reality, and where outer reality speaks of deep, often deeply challenging, inner experience. Ultimately, the work of the gardener involves not only ensouling the garden but also gardening the soul.
As an author, Jeremy is best known for his in-depth researches into the religious life of the ancient Egyptians: Temple of the Cosmos (1996) and Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts (2005). He is also author of How Caterpillars Acquire Wings, and Goethe on Science and his articles and reviews have been published in a variety of journals including Resurgence, The Ecologist and Caduceus. As well as being a gardener and a writer, Jeremy holds a doctorate in theology and religious studies and has for many years worked in adult education, lecturing at the universities of Oxford, Reading and Southampton on the history of philosophy and on ancient Egyptian religion. Click here to see an excerpt of Soul Gardening.