Goshawk Poems

These verses are from goshawk observations since 1955; my first experiences of the bird in the wild overseas--anecdotes of camp life, falconers, birds and probable escaped or released individually, few enough anyway, are considered largely irrelevant in this naturalist's view. Few publications, bar the 1995 Goshawk Lives booklet, have been used; most of this edition is new. I have used almost entirely notes made at the time, in now well over 500 notepads, and diaries and letters; memory illumines only a narrow broken trail. (Colin Simms)

"Colin Simms, whose published nature writings of his own observations go back to 1950; a continuous growing stream of disciplined excellence, a celebration especially of North country nature but also of other Northern Hemisphere work he had done most years since 1955; especially since 1973. His first publication was in verse; his preferred medium, which may explain how little-known he is as yet; his verse is recognised by the best authorities anywhere now." -- Derek Lees-Smith (1980)

"Goshawk Lives is masterly in its kinaesthetic language--all senses interactive as they are in our lives, especially when freed from some of the man-made enclosures or the settlement. It is the language for the basis of knowledge, and the usage is happily free from nostalgia, the blight of the wordsworthian. The poetry exhilarates in its invitation to participate in the verbal presentation of so much care for fact, and care for the maintenance of fact. But this care includes meanings for relationships between 'protection', 'fair game' and 'law' as they radiate into everything human life does." -- Eric Mottram (1995)

Colin Simms, poet, naturalist, and lifelong independent observer, was born in 1939, and lives as an author and freelance naturalist in the North of England, with journeys throughout the northern hemisphere, wherever his objectives live: his homes have been where the martens, otters, birds of prey and other enthusiasms are. He is not an orthodox conservationist, but insists on the privacy, 'isness', for wildlife which modern trends deny. He also demonstrates the poet-naturalist's concern for precise observation, apposite language and cadence. This concern for sound, including northern dialects, mark him a true heir of his long-term mentor, Basil Bunting, a fellow-Northerner.He has published thousands of natural-history letters, articles, reports, scientific notes and papers, broadcasts and (above all) poems, and his scientific work has an international reputation. He has given hundreds of readings, and produced several paintings and prints of mustelids and other predators since 1953, which have been exhibited and are available in very limited editions. He has also made a number of photographic studies of these same subjects. Most of his 1200-plus published poems have been in small-press publications, and his Shearsman volumes are the largest-scale publications of his work to have seen the light of day. In each case they collect related poems and present them as small Collected editions.