Beneath every familiar landscape lies a deeper one.Somerset In Verse reads a county through what lies under it — four hundred million years of rock, ice, water and ore, and everything human hands have since built, dug, drowned and abandoned on top of it.Seventy-six poems travel from the red sandstone spine of Exmoor to the drowning peat of the Levels. Dunkery Beacon, where waterlogged soil creeps the Bronze Age dead a fraction downhill each year. Muchelney, cut off and returned to itself every winter. Glastonbury Tor, a resistant cap of sandstone left standing by the slow subtraction of the marsh. Watchet's retreating cliffs, the lead the Romans smelted on Mendip, the Hamstone hauled out of Ham Hill and walked into garden walls, the reactor blocks at Hinkley Point seen from a town pressed flat against the flood line.Here water must be pumped upward, hoisted against its own dead weight, to be lifted back to the sea. The rhynes hold. The sluice gates hold for one more season. The floodwater lacks malice. The rock does not yearn. They simply outlast the pumps.This is not a guidebook and these are not poems of nostalgia. They are poems of attention — precise, unsentimental, built from the heavy specific names of things. Language is treated here like masonry, with no mortar of sentiment.The fourth volume in British Counties In Verse, an ongoing poetic journey across the counties of Great Britain. It stands entirely alone.Approximately 100 pages.Read it, and you will not cross this county again without looking down.

Beneath every familiar landscape lies a deeper one.Somerset In Verse reads a county through what lies under it — four hundred million years of rock, ice, water and ore, and everything human hands have since built, dug, drowned and abandoned on top of it.Seventy-six poems travel from the red sandstone spine of Exmoor to the drowning peat of the Levels. Dunkery Beacon, where waterlogged soil creeps the Bronze Age dead a fraction downhill each year. Muchelney, cut off and returned to itself every winter. Glastonbury Tor, a resistant cap of sandstone left standing by the slow subtraction of the marsh. Watchet's retreating cliffs, the lead the Romans smelted on Mendip, the Hamstone hauled out of Ham Hill and walked into garden walls, the reactor blocks at Hinkley Point seen from a town pressed flat against the flood line.Here water must be pumped upward, hoisted against its own dead weight, to be lifted back to the sea. The rhynes hold. The sluice gates hold for one more season. The floodwater lacks malice. The rock does not yearn. They simply outlast the pumps.This is not a guidebook and these are not poems of nostalgia. They are poems of attention — precise, unsentimental, built from the heavy specific names of things. Language is treated here like masonry, with no mortar of sentiment.The fourth volume in British Counties In Verse, an ongoing poetic journey across the counties of Great Britain. It stands entirely alone.Approximately 100 pages.Read it, and you will not cross this county again without looking down.