A Surrey Naturalist by John Bevis

Published by Uniformbooks
64pp, 234 x 142; sewn paperback with flaps. 2025, £12.00
Available to buy here: www.colinsackett.co.uk

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 source 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.