Using the IUCN’s redlist for species at risk as a starting point, James Goodman’s second collection is a playful and uncompromising take on the sixth great extinction. Exploring themes of abundance and loss, this is a poetry that shrinks, fades, eddies and disappears like the rhinoceroses, spray toads, snails and pelicans that populate its pages. 

James Goodman is a poet and environmentalist from Cornwall who is now based in Hertfordshire. His first collection, Claytown (Salt, 2011), explores the post-industrialising landscape, geology and nature of mid-Cornwall. James works at a charitable trust that funds community action.

How might we live - and make art - in a time of catastrophic climate change and mass extinction? Or, as the poem 'How might we climate change' puts it, 'How might we walk among the overlapping spirits? How might we consider the gifts?' Stone Mountain Fairy Shrimp is a work of incantation that challenges and decentres the human 'I' with its perspective shifts, swoops and surreal juxtapositions, its deft and daring formal artistry. This 'vagrant catalogue' collides the language of categorisation with reportage, folklore, and the sensuous, messy unpredictability of lived experience. For me, this is more praise song than litany: passionate, wry, sharp-eyed, and vital

Kate Potts.

Cover art by CF Sherratt.

ISBN 978-1-913749-22-4 / 84 pages / 184 x 140mm / Printed on Mohawk Superfine with Favini Crush cover and Stardream end papers.

Collection