by Candlestick Press.
The British archipelago has over 7,000 miles of coastline – everything from limestone cliffs to muddy estuaries and from sand dunes to saltmarshes. These landscapes – and others far beyond – are reflected in these glorious poems.
We find mudflats and wild Scottish shorelines, along with a ballad celebrating the shingle of a Suffolk beach where:
“The shelving’s steep
With stones to skim
As if they’d feet
To hop and skip
Across the deep…”from ‘The Ballad of Shingle Street’ by Blake Morrison
Everywhere, there’s a sense that we go to the land’s edge to escape the hurly-burly of our daily lives. Being close to the ocean is “as near as we come to another world” as Anne Stevenson says in her paean to the North Sea.
Poems by Matthew Arnold, Miriam Darlington, Helen Dunmore, Jen Hadfield, Kathleen Jamie, Blake Morrison, Kenneth Steven, Anne Stevenson, Giles Watsonand Derek Walcott.
Cover illustration by Sam Cannon.
Donation to Surfers Against Sewage.
Candlestick Press is a small, independent press publishing beautiful ‘Instead of a card’ poetry pamphlets. Based in Nottingham in the UK, they’ve been making their mini-anthologies since 2008. Their pamphlets are supplied with an envelope for posting, a bookmark for a special message and an ‘Instead of a card’ sticker to seal the back of the envelope for a lovely finishing touch. All items are collated in a biodegradable cellophane wrapper which is certified to the European (EN13432) norm for industrially compostable packaging and by Vincotte to the OK BIOBASED standard for sustainable, biodegradable film. All their pamphlets are printed in the UK on FSC-accredited paper.