It’s all about the sea…
…especially in the summertime when we are looking ahead to long days at the beach.
If you’ve had a chance to leaf through my recently-published collection of poems, Beyond the Blue, you will have picked up on the fact that I love being by the sea. It doesn’t have to be stretches of white sand in an exotic location; I spent my childhood larking about on the sandy shore of Eastern Beach in Gibraltar, right by the airport runway, splashing in the shadow cast by the aeroplanes taking off and landing. I loved it; many happy childhood memories there. I still go back now and again, and like everyone who has seen many a decade pass by them, I bemoan how cluttered it looks now fringed as it is by high-rise buildings, how many people cluster together under beach umbrellas, how noisy…and then I have a great day out even if a rather more sedate one than those long summer days fifty and more years ago.
I love the sound and smell of the sea, like the way the cliffs of Fairlight Glen near Hastings funnel the sound of the crashing waves up into the trees that stretch inland from the cliff edge, or the rush of the waves on the shingle shore of Brighton Beach, with its screeching gulls and traditional wooden deck chairs. There’s so much that can be written about the sea that my small collection doesn’t really do it justice, but for me this publication was a way of bringing together some of my thoughts and observations made over the years.
It was exactly this that I tried to explain recently when asked about how I wrote the poems, how I chose the themes and what to say. That’s quite a tough question to answer. Poems sometimes seem to emerge unbidden from the end of the pen, and, by way of explanation, I always start a poem with a few scribbled ideas on paper, leaving the computer for the detailed work of revising and rewriting and working the words till they fall into place just right. Yet, even those poems that startle you with their sudden appearance are not really coming out of nowhere; these are the workings of your mind mulling over what you have seen, or heard or experienced in some way. It’s what happens when you give reign to your subconscious to spill out what has been stored and stirred in the back of your mind somewhere, what it’s been ‘cooking’ as one of my daughters puts it.
The question got me thinking about my own process for generating ideas for Beyond the Blue and I had a dig around my old notebooks. It’s rare that I throw away my old scribblings but I do have a cull every now and again because this is only a small home and I would be drowning in scraps of paper otherwise. It turns out that I had noted my thoughts on being by the sea in small notebooks here and there, in no particular order. It’s quite clear to me, reading those back, that this process of looking, thinking, jotting down seemingly disparate and incoherent thoughts was how the book of poems came to be.
Here’s a snippet to show what I mean (some of these are not even quite sentences but it was the images and the words that spontaneously came to mind at the time that were to be important):
“There is a vast blueness that extends infinitely, starting at the point where the sky of an indigo starlit night meets the sea and you know that the horizon is no more than a space that beckons. Even bleakly cloudy days are tinged with blue, as are the hills that glimmer with greens and golds in the sun but reflect purple under that intense blueness of the sky. Everything here points towards the sea. All the rivers tumble down to open brown and muddy mouths by the beaches or the harbours of the Bay. The peaks of the mountains point out to sea, frown at each other across the Strait, while the trees that litter the hill-sides lean away from the vicious gusts of wind that blast in from the ocean or from the East, that Levanter to which all local people refer with dismay and disgruntlement, with suspicion, respect and even temerity. Songbirds flutter above the bushes but give way to the hostility of marauding gulls with their swoops and their shrieks. The sea draws in and throws back and on a calm day rumbles quietly at the harbour walls, like a great beast napping, gathering strength under the sun of summer.”
I wrote that fourteen years ago and I can trace the germ of ideas that flavoured my poems. Like these lines from Mediterranean Blue:
“It is the foam-flecked azure
leading to the ocean
and the steel grey slate
of an eastern calm in spring.
It’s there, in velvet black infinity,
star-studded endlessness,
cradling your every dream.
Its emerald waves are there
To soothe the summer scorching,
and its purple roar in winter storms
fill you with a silent dread;
unspoken fear,
unheeded warning from down the ages.
It broods at your feet of stone,
patient, like a great beast
biding time till time is still.”
If you’d like a copy, Beyond the Blue is available in paperback from Amazon (link below). And if you would like a signed copy from me, I have about half a dozen left - just drop a note in the Contact form and we’ll arrange something!
https://amzn.eu/d/4I9G4eZ
