"Even So reveals the extent to which Mark Roper's move from the UK to the Kilkenny countryside in 1980 has liberated his imagination and, by allowing him to report on lived, day-to-day experience, helped him to become an extraordinarily distinguished 'nature poet'-or, perhaps the better term, 'poetic naturalist'. Ireland's gift to the poet has been an environment that is still relatively unspoiled, and continues to permit ancient harmonious relationships between land-working humans and the birds, beasts, woodland, pools and pastures with which their lives interweave. Roper's gift to his adopted home, and to the great poetic tradition of 'nature writing' in these islands, is laid out here, in this wonderfully varied miscellany of new work and selections from his earlier volumes." - Carol Rumens, from the Introduction