You should read Tarka! It's an experience all its own. It is the same guy, though Tarka is several decades earlier - and pre Oswald Mosley, if that matters to you. Williamson's committment to non-anthropomorphic animal storytelling is really something to see, and it has the same intense and meticulous physical specificity that is the best thing about the Chronicle, only in re: otterlife instead of human material culture and humans trying to derive human feelings from nature.

You'll be happy to know that the otter in this book lives - just not with Phil. It loses two toes in the rabbit trap, and bites him when he releases it, then otters away into the open world where, arguably, it belongs. Like the unconvincing wife who truly understands and loves him for who he is, the wild animal companion is a dream Phil can't hold onto for long.

I'm kind of impressed by the chutzpah of the Poetry editors, tbh.

Same here. I hate the redesign, but with the chutzpah I'm a little in love.