"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.
"Otters and Martens" is the largest collection of poetry to date by this renowned naturalist-author, one which fuses his scientific concerns, his observational skills, and his poetic sensibility.
