A first collection for Leicestershire poet Mark Goodwin, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. "It's thrilling to welcome a new poet into the company of our seriously exciting younger nature writers such as Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane. Mark Goodwin is a poet whose surround-senses are as alert as an animal's, and whose writing is exceptionally grounded in so many of the complexities of being fully human." (Catherine Byron)

"These poems disclose a poet's rich relationship to the natural world by stripping away, by letting a raw objectivist lyric scrape off any rhetorical surface to discover the details beneath. This happens in almost every line, every phrase-so much so that finally his individual words seem to do it by themselves. The result is that /nature/ here ticks and clicks as though it were trying to find a halfway-house language between itself and the writer. Illusion of course, the trick of poetry, and Mark Goodwin is the magician." (Tim Allen)

One of five chapbooks published by Shearsman in the summer of 2012, Layers of Un marks another stage in the development of Mark Goodwin's radical landscape poetry.