'.blends the mysterious tone of dreamvision literature, with the familiarity of loved ballads, illuminated throughout by a magpie's eye for glittering detail.' LAVINIA SINGER 'fearsome and poignant' KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Simpson is a Jerwood/Arvon writing fellow and was a prizewinner in the Thomas Hardy Society's James Gibson Memorial Poetry Competition. He has collaborated with the artist and printmaker Carolyn Trant on the artist's books, Hunting the Wren, The Rhyme of the Reddleman's Daughter and Some Light Remains (all Parvenu Press); editions of which now reside in private and public collections nationally and internationally; including the British Library (Modern British Special Collections), Yale University Library, Louisiana State University (LSU Libraries) and the University of Georgia (Main Library). His book length poem The Untenanted Room, was published as an Agenda Editions in 2011. He lives at the foot of the South Downs with his wife Cynara and their three children. Jeremy Hooker has said of his work, 'the poems are charged with feelings of awe or tenderness or anger. A poetic vision which combines subtle and sensitive apprehension with power.

Reading you, I thought of Edward Thomas's badger, 'That most ancient Briton of English beasts', and of elements in Ted Hughes. I thought of something in the land and in the language, in the Anglo-Saxon and earlier roots.'.