Richard Kerridge

adventures with reptiles and amphibians

Cold blood

As a boy, Richard Kerridge loved to encounter wild creatures and catch them for his back-garden zoo. In a country without many large animals, newts caught his attention first of all, as the nearest he could get to the African wildlife he watched on television. There were Smooth Newts, mottled like the fighter planes in the comics he read, and the longed-for Great Crested Newt, with its huge golden eye. The gardens of Richard and his reptile-crazed friends filled up with old bath tubs containing lizards, toads, Marsh Frogs, newts, Grass Snakes and, once, an Adder. Besides capturing them, he wanted to understand them. What might it be like to be cold blooded, to sleep through the winter, to shed your skin and taste wafting chemicals on your tongue? Richard has continued to ask these questions during a lifetime of fascinated study. Part natural-history guide to these animals, part passionate nature writing, and part personal story, Cold Blood is an original and perceptive memoir about our relationship with nature. Through close observation, it shows how even the suburbs can seem wild when we get close to these thrilling, weird and uncanny animals.

Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians

Cold Blood

N. H. Reeve

This is the first book-length study of the work of J. H. Prynne, who has been described by Peter Ackroyd as `without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression'. The book sets out to introduce Prynne's poetry to a larger audience than it has hitherto received and the authors examine the work in relation to traditions of Romanticism and Modernism, recent theory, debates about Modernism and Postmodernism, political questions of discourse and power, and the implications of lyrical uses of scientific and technical material. The impetus for these discussions is provided by detailed, exploratory readings of individual poems and sequences from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. Nearly Too Much succeeds in the difficult task of providing both a knowledgeable and sophisticated analysis of Prynne's poetry for those to whom it is familiar and a helpful introduction for the benefit of a larger public to whom the work is new.

Richard Kerridge

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