Ken Smith’s poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement - which achieves its full flowering in Shed - with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection.

Shed houses poems from all the poetry books by Ken Smith published by Bloodaxe during the 80s and 90s including a set of new poems. His later work was included in the posthumous You Again (Bloodaxe Books, 2004).

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.

‘Ken Smith was a great poet… His last retrospective collection, Shed, confirmed the immense power of his poetry’ – Jon Glover, Guardian

'Smith's writing exists in permanent disagreement with English fashion. A huge cast of overheard characters, wanderers, losers and remembrancers passes through his writing, bound by a common sense of loss and endurance' - Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times.

‘His poems are squeezed out from under the unrelenting pressures of history, politics and the natural elements… some of his poems read like translations from war-ravaged Eastern Europe’ – Charles Boyle, London Magazine.

'Ken Smith brought an original and memorable voice to poetry in Britain. He spent his writing life not so much swimming against the tide as ignoring the stream’s existence… He was one of those by whom the language lives’ – Sean O’Brien, Independent