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Ted Hughes casts a long shadow over anyone who writes about nature though Jos Smith in Subterranea (Arc Publications, £9,99) brings John Clare to mind, too. He writes beautifully about 'the storm beach knee-deep in plastic debris'; a'refuge of subterranean grudges'; and 'badgers, / buried, fogging their sett with stink'; the Torrey Canyon disaster - 'Thick mist with chemical rainbows warping about us / and the black rind on the water still as leather' - as well as soldiers on Dartmoor, cows on Cadbury Hill, and the slow landscapes along the route of HS2. He has a passion, like Robert Macfarlane, for wonderful words- such as stugged, clitter, fossicking, foraminifera, and grimpen - to describe the wild, and sometimes despoiled, landscape of these islands and namechecks Black Ridge, Hangingstone Hill, the rivers Dart, Taw, Teign and Tavy; as well as William Wordsworth, Daniel Defoe, and Miranda from The Tempest.