Colin Simms is a freelance naturalist, poet and motorcycle enthusiast, who is based in a remote part of northern England. Amongst his partuclar fields of expertise as a naturalist is the mustelidae family - otters and martens, both European and North American. While doing scientific field work, Colin Simms also writes poems about the animals he studies - poems that owe much to the example of Basil Bunting and the Pound tradition, and have a wonderfully gnarled music about them. This volume collects almost 150 of his poems about otters and martens, drawn from his entire writing career....

This is Colin Simms' third Shearsman collection. A noted naturalist and expert on birds of prey, he collects here his poems on the subject of gyrfalcons, magnificent raptor birds that he has studied in Britain, North America, Iceland and Siberia. The book also contains field drawings of the birds.

This volume brings together the majority of Colin Simms' poems that record his visits to Afghanistan, as a naturalist, during the 1980s. Approximately half of the poems previously appeared in two editions of a volume called In Afghanistan, from Writers Forum (1995 and 2001).

Hen Harrier Poems is Colin Simms' fifth collection with Shearsman, and his third devoted to poems on a specific species, following Otters and Martens (2004) and Gyrfalcon Poems (2007). Future plans include volume devoted to poems on merlins and on goshawks. Simms is a naturalist who has observed the harrier and its North American cousin, the marsh hawk, for decades; his poems fuse a rich Bunting-esque diction and sonority with a focused eye and imagination.