These sequences offer speculative responses to three different sets of preoccupations: sproutlands and reseeding; the poetry of Wang Wei; the figure of a ring lying across the surface of the earth. Each develops its own separate prosody and syntax in response to its subject-matter, from the compact lyric style of What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei to the dense rings of language (punched-through with holes) of Rings Resting the Circuit. These booklets offer a three-way view of the development of Larkin's poetry in the wake of his major collection Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt, 2001) and Slights Agreeing Trees (Prest Roots, 2002), both of which were focussed on prose-poetry.

These books were selected by Tony Frazer as Shearsman book of the month for April 2004. Some extracts from the review:

Larkin’s work in recent times has been fired by ecological concerns, and a particular interest in trees. Some of Sprout Near Severing Close appeared in Shearsman quite some time ago, and I was fascinated at the time by the author's approach to his subject, a truly questing and experimental way of dealing with the text. . . . Chinese poetry in translation [often has] a lapidary quality . . . and these versions of Wang Wei retain that quality while presenting the poems with a surface more akin to the Severing Close poems than anything one would expect from the pens of, say, Arthur Waley or David Hinton. . . . With Rings Resting the Circuit we are back in the world of the Severing Close poems, though the surface here is denser, and even more suffused with specific arboreal matter. At first the poems seem determinedly unpoetic, but reading them aloud brings out patterns that don’t quite appear on the page, at least not on first reading. . . . The three volumes offer views of quite different strands in Larkin's work, from the compacted, dense piling of language in Rings, through the lyrics of Wang Wei to a style that . . . seems to fuse the approaches of the other two in the very impressive Severing Close.