Colin Simms - Böcker

"Otters and Martens" brings together 150 poems concerning those members of the mustelid family, written by a poet who writes in the line of Basil Bunting, but whose work is not as well know as it ought to be, owing to the fact that the majority of his publications have been from small presses, where distribution has often been limited. The poems, gathered from over 40 years of activity, demonstrate a spectacularly gnarled language that owes a debt to much older forebears, to exemplars such as Bunting, and to north-country dialect. They are poems for lovers of poetry and of mustelidae alike.

Colin Simms - poet, naturalist, and lifelong independent observer - was born in 1939, and lives as an author and freelance naturalist in the North of England, with journeys throughout the northern hemisphere, wherever his objectives live - his homes have been where the martens, otters, birds of prey and other enthusiasms are. He is not an orthodox conservationist, but insists on the privacy, 'isness', for wildlife which modern trends deny. He also demonstrates the poet-naturalist's concern for precise observation, apposite language and cadence. North American wildlife and the Native American tribes, and their history, have been a life-long fascination of his; this volume brings together all of his long poems, and a large number of shorter poems on these themes.

This volume brings together the majority of Colin Simms' poems that record his visits to Afghanistan, as a naturalist, during the 1980s. Approximately half of the poems previously appeared in two editions of a volume called In Afghanistan, from Writers Forum (1995 and 2001).

Hen Harrier Poems is Colin Simms' fifth collection with Shearsman, and his third devoted to poems on a specific species, following Otters and Martens (2004) and Gyrfalcon Poems (2007). Future plans include volume devoted to poems on merlins and on goshawks. Simms is a naturalist who has observed the harrier and its North American cousin, the marsh hawk, for decades; his poems fuse a rich Bunting-esque diction and sonority with a focused eye and imagination.

These verses are from goshawk observations since 1955; my first experiences of the bird in the wild overseas-anecdotes of camp life, falconers, birds and probable escaped or released individually, few enough anyway, are considered largely irrelevant in this naturalist's view. Few publications, bar the 1995 Goshawk Lives booklet, so well and generously prepared by Harry Gilonis' Form Books, have been used; most of this edition is new. I have used almost entirely only notes made at the time, in now well over 500 notepads, and diaries and letters; memory illumines only a narrow broken trail. (Colin Simms)