Shed, as in the shed at the end of the garden where the first scribblings that begat many of these poems took place, Shed as in the shedding of skins in these poems, the shedding of lives and identities, from the lost President Perdu and the night on the town enjoyed by Smith’s wandering landsman, Charlie Delta, and the seafarer, Abel Baker, to the restless other lives of Eddie in America and the marooned sailor in Medellin. Shed houses poems from all the poetry books by Ken Smith published by Bloodaxe in the last twenty years. It is a journal of two decades of journeys East and West, a deliberation between the longing for home and the longing to keep going through the babble of languages in a world that is all of it borderland and all of it dangerous. Along with The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980, it was superseded by Ken Smith’s Collected Poems (2018).