Bücher von Peter Larkin

"Larkin's way of pulling language up by the roots - literally, as we have frequently to go back to the root meanings of words to understand his unorthodox grammar - does not make it easy for the reader, but he is a rewarding and deeply original poet." -Isobel Armstrong"No poet has ever given so much to trees - his thought, his attention, his invention - which lets him then, in turn, give these trees to us, and in ways that highlight the complexities of their architectures and their contexts, their interactions with the myriad communities in which they participate. This new collection branches out toward grasses, seeds, electricity ... all propelled by a wonderful tanglework of sound that reflects the environmental networks in which trees play such a crucial role. This book is a sheer gift - of trees and to trees, and above all, to readers who love them." -Cole Swensen

These poems entwine round such matters as how roots move as they grow or how feet plant themselves, why a forest admits lanes and lines but obstructs them into shelter, how a tree might relate to all it isn't...

Trees become myriad versions (instalments) of themselves without verging onto an unsensing multiplicity as they traverse partially resistant or patient terrains: so these poems explore contrasting tree-states, as sticks or joints, filters of directional light or self-submerged hedges, which are all manners of contraction, extension, mediation, shareable expression."Larkin's 'theological poetics' assumes a world in which we could be said to be 'short of nothing', however 'scarcely' this is apprehended." -Simon Collings "With relation to the holy as subtext, Trees Before Abstinent Ground continues Peter Larkin's dense and enticing meditations with trees. Larkin's poems lure the reader to attend to the incarnational alterity of trees. Through saturated language, the reader encounters trees' vertical customs and feral horizons, as they engage with the habit and culture of light." -Anne Elvey

"Larkin indicates how one can only pay tribute to the rarity and uniqueness of the scarce by not appropriating it in a fraudulent poetic equivalence of pseudo-poverty, but rather by asymptotically approaching it, with genuine humility, from ever new angles." -John Milbank

A collection of 10 years' work, in part lineated or syllabic but mostly in clustered prose, which investigates ontological echoes of the environmental condition of new scarcity, amid a wealth of inroads. The hoped-for terrain is where its own scarcity on the ground can set seed.

"For Larkin, landscape is not so much a thing as a process, a kind of prosody marked by opening (which the prose poem enacts through clearings of verse) and by colonizing, to a rhythm not necessarily human. It is a process whose articulations colonize the poet-forester's abandoned grammars." - Jonathan Skinner

Contains three long sequences: the title poem, "Open Woods" and "Moving Woods", which represent the author's forays in the eco-poetic field. Blending scientific discourse with more expected poetic approaches, these poems examines nature at an almost microscopic level, as seen from within.