Books Books
Category: Individual Collections, Non Fiction, Places, Poetry, Travel
Number of pages: 132
ISBN: 9781781725177
Publication date: November 11, 2019
Price: £9.99
No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters sees poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, who grew up on the Antrim Coast, explore her own writerly passion for horizon-gazing, on an odyssey from her native Cushendall by way of water’s-edge locations such as Orkney, Felixstowe, Swansea and Cork to Martha’s Vineyard & north from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia’s remote Breton Cove.
Charting, in a travel/literary memoir that blends poetry and prose, research and recall, the maritime sensibilities of loved writers from Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop, Fyfe finds shore-dwellers divide into those who exult in setting out to sea, and those who long instead for headland & island remoteness, an obsession seemingly traceable to absences in childhood, which echo something of Fyfe’s own growing-up on the edge of the North Channel.
This is the story of a quest that took the author to known & unfamiliar coastal waters, via lighthouses, lost islands & small harbours, & back into the shifting tidelines of memory & the hidden inlets of her own family narrative.
Anne-Marie Fyfe
Born in Cushendall, County Antrim, Anne-Marie Fyfe lives in London where she has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings & classes at London’s leading live literature venue, the Troubadour in Earls Court since 1997, created the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, is Poetry Co-ordinator for the annual John Hewitt International Summer School in Armagh, & is former Chair of the Poetry Society. Her distinctive themed creative-writing workshops have inspired writers at festivals, writers’ groups, universities & colleges throughout Britain & Ireland over many years &, over the past 10 years in particular, in Europe (on annual residential writing courses) & in the USA on her reading/workshopping tour each spring. Her latest publication, No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters, was written on an 18-month journey around the coasts of Britain & Ireland &, on the Atlantic’s farther shores, the US’s North-Eastern coastal states & Nova Scotia in Canada. She has published five poetry collections including House of Small Absences (Seren).
“No Far Shore. Charting Unknown Waters is Anne-Marie Fyfe’s omnium gatherum paean to coastlines, the sea, horizons, maps, the people … No Far Shore — rich in islands, shores, horizons, history, and reminiscences — may be savoured several times over.”
Norbert Hirschhorn, London Grip
“Such a thought-provoking collage of recollections and references is personal but also universal, and repays and requires a number of readings. Who is not stirred by tidal forces? Anne-Marie Fyfe has published five poetry collections, her first titled, A House By The Sea. But she is also the organiser of Coffee-House Poetry, which runs readings and classes at the Troubadour in London. I see this book, in one respect at least, as an inspirational series of poetry prompts. Why not use it in that way to make your own maritime journeys, as a starting point for imaginative and creative voyages of your own, in this time of lockdown?”
Greg Freeman, WriteOutLoud
