Small Scale Observations by James Sutherland-Smith

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The poems in James Sutherland-Smith’s eighth collection move from the garden into the neighbourhood of “a down-at-heel Hapsburg town” and then range into the nearby forest, the per sonal and the past. Borders are crossed and seemingly insignificant creatures suddenly gain visionary dimensions. The title poem recalls a poet whose attention to the small-scale made his work seem minor, yet as Hardy wrote “he noticed such things,” a heedfulness absent in a contemporary world where both simplistic analysis and solutions constantly fail to address threats to our very existence. Shearsman Books Show more