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Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
-- from 'Digging'
With its lyrical and descriptive powers, Death of a Naturalist marked the auspicious debut of one of the century's finest poets.
Poems deal with universal themes of fatherhood, the past, mortality, nature, violence, school, rural life, love, fear, and childhood.
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'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems I've read for some time.' - C.B. Cox in the Spectator
'The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding [...] His subject is those things which are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be praised in his own work.' - Christopher Ricks, New Statesman
'Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.'