Description
***Pre-orders only – for delivery in early October**
Blue: a lament for the sea is one woman’s journey through the interstices of land and sea, grief and love. The medieval Gaelic myth of the Isle of Iona escaping an apocalyptic flood infuses this contemporary lyric epic. Words unravel from deep time to the Anthropocene and our collapsing ecosystems, asking: what is hope in these times?
“In haunting, melodic lyric, MacWhirter turns language itself into a ‘thin place’ of remembering, reckoning and renewal.”
– Prof Jenn Ashworth, author of Ghosted.“As our world grows bluer, through sea level rise, floods, and storms, we need to listen to poets. In phrases that capture oceanic movements and both medieval and contemporary seascapes, Liz MacWhirter’s ‘Blue: a lament for the sea’ charts our ecological grief and abiding connections to water and rock, humans and seabirds, surf and tides. Listen to these voices!”
– Prof Steve Mentz, a founder of the Blue Humanities movement and author of Sailing without Ahab.“‘Blue: a lament for the sea’ is a powerful work of mourning and hauntings. At once elegy and call to arms, this is a spellbinding meditation on margins and oceanic longing that leaves the reader changed.”
– CJ Cooke, author of The Last Witch“Liz MacWhirter’s long poem ‘Blue: a lament for the sea’ is an immersive refreshment taking us to Iona, Columba’s island, in the Hebridean sea off the Isle of Mull, but in fact taking us into deep time, prehistory, pre-fossil geology, below earth’s crust and into the almost unimaginable past, but then projecting forward, into an all-too-imaginable future of predicted catastrophe, when the waters will rise and yet Iona itself – herself – shall rise even above them. A long poem – but not too long! Chapbook-size, belying its profundity but promising lightness of movement. It carries its weighty material easily, in a free, slim, slender verse, immediately accessible, emotionally buoyant in a challenging narrative of discovery and disclosure, with a first-person singular finding out for herself what lies beneath and what the future portends. This ‘nameless person’, the island and the sea surrounding them are the three protagonists in the drama. The lyrical exploration that the poem enacts is fraught and yet beautiful: its tone is exactly as its subtitle discloses, a ‘lament’, a keening, and yet it is wide-eyed at the colour and vividness of the visual, and the spiritual substance Iona provides. Gulls, whales, sharks, the ghosts of martyred monks, proximate history with the Lords of the Isles, all come into the shifting panorama, but the sustaining meaning of the poem carries its own quality not as a warning but as a restrained sorrowing for what is already lost and being further lost. Its beauty is its own protest, no more nor less.”
– Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow
Liz MacWhirter is a writer, speaker and theologian. Her debut novel, ‘Black Snow Falling’ (Scotland Street Press, 2018), gained a Carnegie Medal nomination, and her poetry is published by Lucy Writers, Yale GCRE, Theology in Scotland and 4M Netlabel. Liz has spoken at the Edinburgh International Book Festival; at the Universities of Yale, Oxford, and St Andrews; and is a Scottish Book Trust Live Literature Author. As a creative copywriter Liz won 20 awards, and her PhD, ‘When Hope Takes Flight,’ explores theopoetics and trauma (University of Glasgow). Liz spends as much time as possible in nature, hiking around her home in the Border hills.
