Sea Swim
by John Wedgwood Clarke
'Your wake complicates mine. Our footprints dream in the tide.'
Throughout 2011, Sea Swimmers swam in Scarborough's South Bay as part of imove, the Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire. They were led bravely into the waves by poet John Wedgwood Clarke, whose eighteen-poem sequence inspired by this experience was collected in book form and published by Valley Press in April 2012.
The poems explore the fluent, fragile and sometimes agonisingly pleasurable relationship between the swimmer, the land and the sea around Scarborough; how swimming transforms the way we feel ourselves to be in our bodies, and the liberating effects these changes have on the imagination. Sea Swim may be as close as you can get to swimming in the sea without donning a wetsuit.
"His work is amongst the best to have emerged from new poets in this country over the past two or three years."
— Simon Armitage
"I am thrilled to be patron of this simple and simply beautiful idea. Poetry is going down to the sea again."
— Carol Ann Duffy
Edition: Second, Paperback (2014)
Date Published: 2012-04-16
ISBN: 9781908853066
Catalogue Number: VP0029
Number of Pages: 32
Cover design by Jamie McGarry
Cover photograph by Lara Goodband
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