Author(s): MIRIAM DARLINGTON

World Poetry

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 Watson and Derek Walcott. Cover illustration by Sam Cannon.