Trees become myriad versions (instalments) of themselves without verging onto an unsensing multiplicity as they traverse partially resistant or patient terrains: so these poems explore contrasting tree-states, as sticks or joints, filters of directional light or self-submerged hedges, which are all manners of contraction, extension, mediation, shareable expression.

Larkin’s ‘theological poetics’ assumes a world in which we could be said to be ‘short of nothing’, however ‘scarcely’ this is apprehended. –Simon Collings

With relation to the holy as subtext, Trees Before Abstinent Ground continues Peter Larkin’s dense and enticing meditations with trees. Larkin’s poems lure the reader to attend to the incarnational alterity of trees. Through saturated language, the reader encounters trees’ vertical customs and feral horizons, as they engage with the habit and culture of light. –Anne Elvey