• Imparkments (the Surrogate has Settled) (Veer Books, 2012)
• Give Forest its Next Portent (Shearsman, 2014)
• City Trappings (Housing Heath or Wood) (Veer Books, 2016)
• Introgression Latewood (Shearsman, 2017)

Sprout Near Severing Close (Poems 1-4)

1

Where woodpeckers physic the woods
short, healing wasn't suspect
if cut is taken in slip.

Curt docks of circuit
affray low region post-envelope:
sprout with the limb fusiform,
hold on scrap lignant pasture.

Original trees blew long thirst
from blockage to props of clip,
capitulum was cut of their headiest
capillary to fountainous shelter.

Sharp stint below bend be stilled
upwards, owing they out-trussed freely
tied over so far torn.

2

Naked of house abate the stacks
sheer boles by failed roof,
reduction-to a room up appends.

Easily row more axes
against single spout? You
will have, given each tree
is swivel of it swathed afloat.

New woods disabrupted the ruck
as if clearance (not sprout)
had veered to an open (not
shaven) horizon.

Forest is the compaction of its
brush terse downward, reverse
motile juvenile in mix or smash
peaks at the widest unfollowing recompense.

Where shoot from is reconcussion
off the cushion crash, length
leaner in stubframe with sur-
vival repeating the setback,
fineal exudation's straw
a ferule on a stick.

3

Hits a scab a preservation
where woods were worst of the few
heavy cuts, incessant
jerking of post-abandonment.

Roomed over empty embedded root
bears the stark of the entire of it,
to obtain what each splinter stood.

A spawn of tiny darts,
zero quirks on uncoated earth
but in cover of sprouting
do set a nap on dearth
without correction of thread:
thin hunger like to tall.

Flown snag of an oak stump
bitten now to the slights,
to the punctured kiosk
in unvagrant slicing.

Where a corrosion loan is pro-
tection's sentience: the forest
doesn't lean but pall at crown.
Fell to amend clearance.

4

Remembering primitive severance
until rising wood outfloors
like the flatness of early arbour,
prime fallen clad of the undisplaced.

Awake cleared forest and
enfuture a field for stump!
Curvate what stilts within root
by knotting it swarms
of sprout below
any wrangle in the height.

Not peeling back: because
on naked ground to give sharp
imprint of slump: the petty
gear finds above shear-line.

No shade stands but is
inextricable low-ranging:
shelter gutting it will
lose height to rail
while unvacancy empales the floor.

A pact with the decreasing
naturals, those sprouts
are most tender
lapel of the hold.

Each down-sliver grown
too weak to stand in the link
outside the blight softness
staying on spur.

"With a few exceptions, the sequences collected in Terrain Seed Scarcity are formally of a piece: a series of brief, extremely dense prose paragraphs, separated by large stanza breaks. Occasionally a prose passage breaks into verse, though the tense, verbless notations and almost arbitrary linebreaks (often mid-word) have a texture closer to open-form marginalia than polished lyric utterance... Despite my hesitations and uncertainties about this often very difficult collection, it gives me a firmer sense of the importance of what Larkin's doing in a way that encountering his individual chapbooks never did... Larkin himself is sometimes almost painfully modest in his claims for his work - at one point he says it hopes to achieve 'a minor freshness' (82) - but for this reader Terrain Seed Scarcity was one of the genuine discoveries of the past few years." -- Nate Dorward, The Gig

"This is a long-overdue collection which I welcome unreservedly. Ten years of complex prose poetry concerned with matters ecological and with the possibility of post-modern pastoral. Innovative stuff indeed, it can be thorny in places, as befits the dense undergrowth of this terrain, but finishes with the luminous seven-line 'found verses of 'Spirit of the Trees'." --Tony Frazer, Shearsman

"Peter Larkin advances his poetry with such meticulous care, and such scholarly tenderness, that it's a constantly recharging shock for the reader to experience the strange, radical exhilaration that arises from the movements of his work. The devotional quality of Larkin's penetrating attention to the rural scene is striking enough; but it's from the sensational affection of attentiveness itself, the visceral intellection of the reading relationship at large, that his writing derives its special intricacy and candour. Sheer, sometimes daunting, but always overwhelmingly attractive and vividly faithful, Peter Larkin's poetry is, above all, quick enough to register in high definition the complex promise of the on-rushing world." --Chris Goode

"One who comes close to that challenge in the scientific specificity of his grammar is Peter Larkin. The idea of creating the pastoral through the absent, and a pastoral absence in nature, is both to reaffirm the independence of nature from human agency, and to lay claim to nature.  There's a spiritual hierarchy observable here that is not radical, but the integrity of nature as thing-in-itself is, as a thing not to be fetishised." --John Kinsella

"For Larkin, landscape is not so much a thing as a process, a kind of prosody marked by opening and by colonizing, to a rhythm not necessarily human."--Jonathan Skinner

"Peter Larkin’s sustained engagement with the poetics of scarcity registers the eco-philosophical ramifications of a resource economics now generating scenarios of absolute scarcity in the face of unlimited growth. Simultaneously, he explores something like a theological ontology of dedication, what it means to accept a mode of finite being with roots in the radicalism of Romantic ecologies, by which scarcity can be understood as prophetic."--Carol Watts

"Larkin indicates how one can only pay tribute to the rarity and uniqueness of the scarce by not appropriating it in a fraudulent poetic equivalence of pseudo-poverty, but rather by asymptotically approaching it, with genuine humility, from ever new angles." --John Milbank

"Peter Larkin’s near-microscopic focus upon what he sees allows us to become aware of what might lie behind his ‘ambivalent fascination." --Ian Brinton