A Surrey Naturalist
John Bevis
ISBN 978 1 910010 38 9
64pp, 234 x 142
paperback with flaps
2025, £12.00
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Advance Information
The poems in this new collection are sourced, chapter for chapter, from Eric Parker’s Surrey Naturalist (1952).
“It occurred to me that this was a promising resource for found poetry. I thought that using those same words, detached from their original context, would allow me to build new meanings from locally-sourced Surrey materials. This would be a way of by-passing the selectiveness of my memories, the bias of my experiences, the taint of hindsight.”
The summary on the front flap of the original book’s dustjacket has been reworked accordingly, in verse, for this book’s synopsis:
A book of rivers, birds and men
A wealth of error, of changing naming
At the suggestion of a poet of today.
The work of animal and season
A system of anecdotes and curiosities
To charm magnetically Surrey.
Reflections of streams and ponds
Swallowed into the earth
The very atmosphere of Surrey.
...
John Bevis was born in Guildford, Surrey, in 1954, and now lives in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He is a writer whose poetry titles include Letter Winged Kite (2020), The Window Paintings (2015) and Some Alternatives to Flock (2008). Prose titles include An English Library Journey (2022), The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography (2016) and Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds (2010).